Long time PLC member Ben Lev in Sebastopol, CA has a question for the group: Hey Ben: I use jGR rubric on a 10 scale for Interpersonal Conversational Skills grade about once a week. My way of staying sane is to assume students are around 8/10 unless they show me otherwise, up or down on […]
This updated article from 2013 might be of use to some of us right now as we begin another year: In the first weeks of the school year we use CWB and OWI, etc. to set up stories and make contact with our kids. Some in the group have suggested moving quickly from CWB/OWI, etc.
This is from TPRS in a Year! – Josh is cool. There is no way getting around it. If I pay attention to that fact, I will feed it, but if I ignore it, his coolness will get out into the room somehow anyway, in more subtle ways. Either way, the fact that Josh is
These can be made into posters or, for those who are taking a class period this fall – hopefully early on – to explain to their students CI acquisition theory so that the kids stop complaining about not having worksheets and so that they will know how they are being graded, I share these posters
From Alisa: I would love to create a collection of scripts for young /elementary kids (maybe to sell? – I dunno I’ve never sold any content…) I often base stories off seeds from other stories – mine are often not entirely original. Recently we had a blast with an embedded reading from Carol Gaab’s Cuéntame
There is now a twin book to the Ultimate CI Books, but for middle school. It’s a beauty and perfect for middle school language instruction. It’s not on my website yet but will be there in the next month. By the way, I’m changing the name of the Ultimate CI Books for reasons having to
Rule #2 of our Classroom Rules is “One person speaks and the others listen”. It has been around for 15 years. We have talked often over the years about how to make it and the other rules work when our kids need refocusing, for example here: https://benslavic.com/blog/bail-out-moves-by-brian/ I have referred to that “stop-walk-smile” technique as
With the proliferation of all the new CI sites, there must be hundreds of them by now, our little group gets to hide even better than before, when it was only one of about two or three such sites, 5 years ago or so. Before, when the PLC started as my personal blog about 15 years
Anne Matava told me recently that my explanation of the Invisibles this past summer at the Maine workshop made a difference in her understanding of how they work in the classroom. She had read the book A Natural Approach to Stories (Teacher’s Discovery) but not fully understood it until I modeled it in a one
Here is an interesting story about how languages came about for those who, like me, were unfamiliar about it: https://www.reference.com/education/tall-tower-babel-df80ca73c0db46b2?aq=tower+of+babel+story#
When a class gets snarky, we bail on them. In thus reacting and not ignoring their rude or even slightly rude behavior, they notice. Most teachers go on teaching. Each time they do this, it makes another line in their face. We must learn a new behavior in our teaching – we must learn to
Here is a long response to a short question from Keri in Connecticut about the Invisibles that she asked way back in May of 2016: “My problem with the Invisibles is in coming up with “the problem” for the character. I know, the kids should be coming up with one, but if they don’t? If
