September 2015

My new t-shirt:

From John Piazza: On Latin Best Practices today, John Bracey shared some real insight about the traditional way of teaching grammar. It certainly resonates with my experience, as both teacher and learner of Latin: “I think that it is hard for traditional teachers to recognize that their students, even their superstars, are not actually retaining

Kids play in sandboxes. To them, when they are in a sandbox, even if they are doing “work” (building a sand castle, making something out of sticks), to them it’s still play. What about us? Do we as CI teachers play in sandboxes? Most certainly yes we do. The sand we use is the language.

James Hosler shares an important moment from yesterday in his Latin classes: I just kicked a kid out of my last class of the day. I hate doing that, but he just wouldn’t shut up. Real cute… you know the type, right? I had already kicked him out once a few days ago, too. So

Eric is in the process of trying out a new idea to teach high frequency verbs. I thought that if some others of us in the group tried it as well we could give him some feedback. I love the way the verbs are grouped here. Eric explains: “Here is my first, yet-to-be-trialed plan: I’ve put

From Brother Eric: Gotta post a TPR breakthrough! I tried how Asher teaches TPR –https://youtu.be/KmfnrYerYbY – the teacher demoing with 2 students, the rest of the class observing. Wow, did this make classroom management easier, especially with the younger kids! The rest of the class was told to be silent and just observe. The rest

Pour some concrete into your shoes. Or attach a 20 lb. ankle weight on each ankle. Take a sentence: Jacob was born on Sept. 29, 2011. Walk to Jacob. It will take a while because of the weight. Feel the weight. Drag yourself over there. Touch Jacob on the shoulder. Now walk back over to

We sometimes get bogged down when getting details via circling during stories. We get too many details. Details are great – they flush out the spatial imagery of the story. But they shouldn’t overshadow its linear piece, the actions/events that move things forward. It’s not like we have three hours to create a story. How

from Linda Li: With beginning students, I limited to three verbs “was at”, “saw”, “ate” as they learned those three words already. I used my 3 details as an example: 1. I was in India. 2. I saw the Dalai Lama. 3. I ate a lot of pizza. The students have to ask me questions

Here is a link to Michael’s blog where he gives more information about how to do Two Truths and a Lie: http://optimizingimmersion.com/two-truths-and-a-lie-2/ For the record and I could be wrong but the originator of the Special Person activity is Jody Noble and Sabrina Janczak to my knowledge along with Nina Barber originally authored the Two

Linda Li used Sabrina’s Two Truths and a Lie today. I observed one of the classes. She first modeled the activity, using a power point slide show, saying that she: Met the Dali Lama (who was in Delhi) Ate a lot of pizza Went to the hospital The kids asked a lot of questions, drawing

It is so nice to teach in a SBGR school where the four learning habits of respect, responsibility, perseverance and collaboration are not just meaningless but terms to describe how a child learns. In fact, I am firmly convinced after almost forty years of doing this that the learning habits/social skills/EQ are FAR more important