Date of Class: 3/8/14
Day of Class: Saturday
MC: Patrik
DJ:
Assistants:
Module: Housekeeping
How Many Learners: 6
Score: 4+5+6+6+6+4=31
What happened (as short or as long as you like, but be specific): Very nice.. good group, and a supervisor came and another Spanish speaker I wasn’t expecting. though the technique was not the strongest, folks stuck with the mostly dictation activities, and I saw both the need for continued practice and also recognition of previously studied items.

Date of Class: 3/9/14
Day of Class: Sunday
MC: Patrik
DJ:
Assistants:
Module: Housekeeping
How Many Learners: 5
Score: 4+5+7+7+6+6=31
What happened (as short or as long as you like, but be specific): Whew! tired today, with setting the clock forward and a late night at work. I had to push to get it going, but they were all ready to go, and I could definitely see the engagement and the learning paying off… I see piece of grammar structure, like it’s starting to stick. And there’s more work to do!

Date of Class: 3/22/14
Day of Class: Saturday
MC: Patrik
DJ:
Assistants:
Module: Housekeeping
How Many Learners: 4
Score: 3+4+5+6+4+4=26
What happened (as short or as long as you like, but be specific): The best thing about today’s group – I started picking up a little Nepali – they were saying this and that and maybe.. so I could hear them say words that I didn’t exactly know what they meant, but I repeated after them and it made them crack up so much (I had to hope that I didn’t say anything offensive!). Technique today was a little flat, but I kept it moving with lots of sentence level dictation and short response questions – focusing mostly on “Is it? “It is” “It isn’t” and then going back to some of the other questions – “Are you?” “Do you?” This was challenging, just on the edge of productive confusion. Ah – I did try something new today.. Skywriting – and I learned that it was ok for just the letters – but even better with me skywriting the letters and they’re trying to spell the word. Interestingly, even if they wrote it down just copying the letters I was writing, it added another dimension of challenge/practice.. normally, I say the word, they try to figure it out.. and I spell if they need it.. here, we spelled it with no sound, and they were trying to construct the sound from it – just like we do with names but there they have the sound of the letter, but not the visual of the letter. I think it would be good to expand this by having them try to say the word of familiar vocabulary without writing it down, so they have to remember, first by saying the letter, then not even saying the letters, but just shouting the word out. Also, this will provide a great set up for the more abstracted sign language forms

Date of Class: 4/6/14
Day of Class: Sunday
MC: Patrik
DJ:
Assistants:
Module: Housekeeping
How Many Learners: 6
Score: 7+7+7+7+7+5 = 40
What happened (as short or as long as you like, but be specific): Today was the last class of this round, and I’m really excited about the progress I can totally see – I was able to take many of the activities and rachet them up a level. So, now we are asking them if someone else has a day off, and then reporting that to me. We are spelling each others’ names. I had them skywrite vocabulary in the room onto sticky notes, and then place them around the room – interesting and fun because they were all able to work together to write the words down, and then because they all put their notes up in their own order, they could work with others or try themselves. It was a very solid transition.

The last 30 minutes or so, I asked them if they called the supervisors, and they said they did, and this prompted us into a really good language experience activity. In this way, because we have the strong connection between the learners, they know the activities, and we have been moving them towards more production. But because the group is still multi-level we have to turn it into a correction/dictation activity. This seems incredibly powerful and engaging, because everyone else wants those same words too. Even better to return to them next time. Most of all, we meet our goals for some of the learners, because they started to call and make reports. Super cool.