Those in the group who have been here since the beginning, when it was just a blog, about fifteen years ago, know the impact Robert Harrell has had on our professional development over the years. One need only visit the primers above to see his influence on our thinking. His leadership has helped us through […]
Back in 2008 Robert found a wonderful line from poet Hart Crane and shared it with us here. It deeply supports Krashen in the most beautiful way: “One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.” Robert went on:
Scotty Jimenez is an accomplished Invisibles/NTCI teacher in Mississippi. He shares with us a variation on the Word Chunk Team Game:
People think – mistakenly – that non-targeted instruction is unstructured. Nissa Quill proves otherwise: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tzrT1jSPpXowY9ZKkVSFyU-649dalYRaycNXZr0CVGc/edit#slide=id.g346e0980f1_0_45
Dana reports from India: Hi Ben, We had some inclusion consultants come to our school this week as we are moving towards being a more inclusive international school. They played this video, “The Myth of Average” – https://youtu.be/4eBmyttcfU4 When he talks about designing our curriculum so we teach to the edges, I think what you
Mila is in a school that still needs grades to be based on 100 points. In CI we all use rubrics now, of course, usually based on 5 or 1o points – certainly not 100. So most of us who are still in schools like Mila’s have to transfer an average of, for example, 7.4
A question from Sean in Chicago: I would love to hear how teachers inspire their students to create meaningful and colorful (figuratively speaking) invisible characters. I’m finding the need to help my students with this. Perhaps I could have them sketch three characters, share, get feedback from their peers, then choose one of the three
From TPRS in a Year! – Skill #41: The En Route Event When an actor is transitioning from one location to another, funny things can happen: Class, Cinderella is going through the forest. Does she go by automatic toilet or by toad, class? That’s right, class, she goes by toad! C’est évident!. …… Class, a
Q. If we don’t use stories to help teach grammar, then how will students be able to express themselves without these “tools” to communicate their own thoughts? They only hear us (teachers) speaking Spanish for 80 minutes/day, 5 days/week for a few semesters. How will students know how to compose high level essays for the
A lot of us have great ideas, but because we are lower down on the pecking order in the school system, what we really think and do is rarely heard by those around us, above us, in spite of all the pointless meetings. The assumption is that the department chair, the district coordinator, the principal
From TPRS in a Year! – Skill #20: Chants The repetition of chants can burn new language into the kids’ minds better than practically anything else! If you can just get the words into the kids’ bodies via a good gut-based chant, it will, via the repetition, work wonders for retention. In my view, chants are
Q. When you describe the transportation scenes to get the actors from level 5 to level 6, you don’t mention how much time they take and you don’t build that time into the overall 25–35 minute desired time frame. Wouldn’t the transportation scenes add time to the story and “blow it up” too much? A.
Fun Skills – Whacky Transportation Scene – Part 2 Read More »
