Heather Frackiewicz

Heather has very kindly clarified some things about ways to use this site: Bonjour to all of Ben’s readers! I recently fixed an issue with the RSS feed from the blog – if you tried to use it, it would not download the posts. As I have an iPad and am using the Blogshelf app

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Rick Winterstein

[Ed. note: I’ve been up in the mountains if you’re wondering why it’s been quiet here lately. Things will slowly crank up as we get back into August, when we can talk about ways to reach the kids with personalized comprehensible input in those first all-important weeks of the year. The week of July 26

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Jennifer

Jennfer sent me this interesting email: Ben, I have always been a 4%er, and now I may know why. I’m wondering how this can impact my classroom… I picked up my Russian copy of Bednaya Anya (Poor Ana) and have been happily reading through it as my bedtime reading. As such, I have been re-reading

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A Sham

There are two things that are considered standard operating procedure in foreign language classrooms that I just can’t accept. I really believe, and so must state that as my truth, that some, many, teachers are getting away with ineffective practices in their classrooms and nobody is calling them on it, in two ways specifically. First,

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Beginning The Year

We created a “beginning the year” category here a few months ago. Here are a few quick additions to that list, which I will time stamp as well for August. First, there is no doubt that TPR is in for a renaissance in my CI classroom. A lot of us seem to have been thinking

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Revisiting The Realm

Those who remember the heyday of the Realm in TPRS can recall the great excitement around the idea of building an entire year of stories around certain medieval/gang/whatever characters, as the class chose. I think I have finally figured out why the Realm didn’t work for me. Those very characters, as excited as the kids

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