Eric is testing a sequence of high frequency verbs. Here is the link: https://benslavic.com/blog/a-good-ideateaching-hf-verbs/ I have been using this. It is really good. I just take the sheet and hold it in my hand as a story script. You may want to try this one! Thanks Eric!
I was just talking with Linda Li and she told me that ten years ago in China she tried a yoga class, her first ever, and it was at the wrong level. She said that that bad experience has never left her. She feels that it prevented her from trying yoga again. We both agreed
Steven Ordiano in Fresno CA has given us some really great free write materials. One is a form for free writes and the other is an assessment instrument that resembles OWATS: FluencyWrite FluencyWriteAnalysis
I don’t even know if this one is even listed in our list of bail out moves. It’s really simple. Whenever we need to bail out (when the CI is sluggish and we feel kind of scared that we don’t know what we are doing, which is fairly common for all of this in this
It occurred to me that some of the newer people in our group may not know what our curriculum looks like. In a word, we teach verbs. We don’t teach a mosh pit of intellectual/academic material that can’t be understood. We come into class and our goal is to get as many repetitions on a
Our students forget content but they remember language. It’s a big joke that people are hired to teach kids things that they will definitely forget after the test, things that will have zero use to them whatsoever. Why? Because the information is going to the wrong place. It’s like putting all the furniture into the attic
This story from Jim Tripp has an elegant simplicity in the structure. The one I am going to do with the Skyped in kid from Japan may be too complex. I am glad Jim sent us this. It points up something of great importance – that many of us, certainly me, tend to forget.
Some more details/clarifications from Linda Li on the current discussion about question words: I have two sets of Question words (Pinyin, and characters. Both posted in my classroom. Depending where they sit in the classroom and where I am, they can access to both of them. Although, I intentionally direct intermediate and advanced students to
A student studied long and hard for a (memorized material) Spanish test. The test came and the student was upset that the test was too easy – he studied far more than he needed to, he said, and felt bad about the wasted time. His mom said, “Oh, no time is ever wasted when you
Next week one of my students has to go to Japan for the week. I’m going to Skype him into our classes because he doesn’t want to miss class. We’ll beam him in from Japan on his iPad. Here are the target structures I will use: lost something of great importance looked for found Script
Ruth and I had a side conversation in the comment fields earlier tonight about question words in relation to the overall discussion about Linda Li’s recent Two Truths and a Lie classes here in our school, where her kids were knocking it out of the park with speech output (because of the super high – what I
There is a poignant scene toward the end of the film Night at the Museum when Amelia Earhart whispers into Ben Stiller’s character’s ear, “Have fun!” before flying off in her red airplane. It reminds me of a topic we return to here all the time – the idea that when we focus on the
