If you want to teach a demo lesson on parents night, we do have lots of ideas and articles that we have collected here over the years, but I would like to add one more.
Yesterday I saw Linda Li teach a parent night group wants and doesn’t want in 14 minutes. I kept waiting for her to get to the next word (who) on her tripod paper but she never got there.
So I know what I would do if I had to talk to a group of new parents and students about my language classes. I would teach:
wants
does not want
who
where
with whom
I’d use plenty of gestures as Linda did yesterday.
I’d be lucky to get to where in the short ten minutes that they give us for those meetings. But if I got to with whom and it turned out to be Donald Duck I would then be able to give the audience a taste of the CI fun.
Linda was aiming for wants coffee. I know because, as I used to do for Susie Gross, I am Linda’s coffee runner. Most of us know what she does with the coffee and Dr. Krashen at her workshops (search Linda Li for more on that), and there is no reason we can’t do that with parents at one of our own presentations.
And guess what? When you do that you can kiss you parent night stress good bye with the above plan, which is marvelous and so easy and so much fun to do. Like right now I could present to 1000 people having seen Linda do that thing yesterday.