Total Physical Response

My "student-teacher" year seems like forever ago, but I will always remember some of the great things I learned that year. I was a student teacher at a school with a 95% ESL population. Most of these kids were just being exposed to English as they entered kindergarten. I have never seen a school so determined to find and use the best strategies for their students. There is one teaching method that definitely stuck with me throughout the years. This is the Total Physical Response (TPR) to teaching. In my class, we try to associate a new concept (word, skill, shape, etc) with a physical movement. It seems when they act out a word, verbalize it, AND read the word......they remember it! AMAZING! Here are two of my students creating the lowercase n. I taught  letter writing using the terms "sticks and curves" so after doing this activity, they did not forget those terms!