Greg reports from Chicago: Hi Ben, Just wanted to share with you two of the drawings from the PERSONA ESPECIAL interview. This is something that I don’t know if other teachers who are doing PERSONA ESPECIAL do but I decided to do the process of PERSONA ESPECIAL the same way that you say to do […]
Steven has added a new job. It really is clever to get class energy directed at those frequent flyers to the bathroom: “The Rewinder” signals me to recycle to story whenever someone steps out to the restroom….
It’s not just in limiting the amount of questions that you ask that you find control in your delivery. It’s like a pitcher in baseball who, if she lacks control, cannot win the game because she will walk everybody…. Now control involves the classroom managament piece, of course, and in particular command of Classroom Rule
Whenever we communicate with our students using comprehensible input, whether in building a character or a story, a one word image, etc., we ask questions, to which the kids answer in yes/no or one word answers. This is how CI works in the early years, and it results in speech output sometimes as early as
We want to be like pitching machines, which, being robotic, do not overly concern themselves with the ideas part/where the story goes. It’s like a director deciding to develop the dialogue for a film around the personality of an actor (the class) and not on a script connected to targets (the “curriculum”). There is no
Tina and I won’t repeat our 15 city workshop tour around the country next summer. It was tough. Instead we are doing this, from a recent post by Tina on FB: Planning Summer Institutes for World Language Proficiency 2018! Here is DRAFT information on what they will potentially look like. These ftrainings will set you
If anyone is feeling frustrated that their kids aren’t producing much in their classrooms right about now, consider: It has been said that a flood of input must precede a trickle of output, meaning that we delay assessing writing or speaking output until it happens naturally with our students. The rule of thumb in comprehension
This is Tina here. I thought I might as well jump right in here and post this. I just finished up marking the kids’ portfolios in class with them for the last two days. It was hectic, sure, but not as bad as wasting a perfectly-good grading day. I figure why spend that nice quiet
Whenever we communicate with our students using comprehensible input, whether in building a character or a story, a one word image, etc., we ask questions, to which the kids answer in yes/no or one word answers. This is how CI works in the early years, and it results in speech output sometimes as early as in levels
In recent “we really do work for robots” news, Jen reports: Our school is starting a new initiative with competency based grading and common assessments. While the initiative largely does not affect me (only math, science, English, Social Studies), we are undergoing a process of rewriting all of our course competencies. This is great news!
Here is Alisa’s idea for generating class reading materials – instead of buying books – in order to, each year, expand the class library at the elementary level. I bet that this idea would work at any level. I will add examples as soon as I get them from her: Instead of the comic books
Generating Class Reading Materials at the Elementary Level Read More »
We need to share more pics. Remember when we sent in what our morning commutes looked like? I really enjoyed seeing them and I know others did as well. Stephen shared his in Fresno, we had two from downtown Chicago from Carmen and Sean and a nice one from New Hampshire from jen. So send
