Tina shares emails with me from happy parents. She is getting a lot of them this year. Here is another one: Hi Tina, This is [Jeff], parent of seventh grader [Emily] who is in your Spanish class. I am writing to tell you how much I appreciate your teaching methods. Emily has learned what I […]
This is an article of major importance. The link is so long that my mouse almost couldn’t grab it and started squealing as mice do so if you want to read this article – I read it about ten years ago so went back to it like an old friend today – just search this
Mike Peto recently published this on his blog: https://mrpeto.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/story-listening-almost/ I find every word of his article compelling and important. He talks about how doing Story Listening as per Beniko Mason, which is getting a ton of testing at the secondary school level in Oregon right now, really works. I am beyond happy to find another
When we start out the year we need to make sure that our students know the rules and how they will be graded. We need to make certain that our students get practice in knowing how to function in our comprehensible input classroom before starting full stories. In the Big CI Book, I have discussed
Here is the second article that goes with the one published yesterday: What does it mean to breathe life into our instruction using comprehensible input? What does it mean to avoid specific activities/trees in favor of an overarching concept of CI/the forest? What does it mean to gain mastery over the method? It means to
Here is a targetless script from Anne Matava: Targetless Scripts Time Travel Notice that there are no target structures. Anne addresses that (a recent topic here) in an email to me: “If people want to target phrases they can pick a few to use. Maybe flies, feels. The other thing that this script is really good
Tina sent me the link below. It contains the core of my work of my life. When I entered the profession, there was none of this attitude toward being alive in the FL classroom. Everybody was dead, stuck in the left analytical hemisphere of their brains. They were literally half wits, everyone in the classroom,
Michael Peto is currently writing a guide called “50 Things You Can Do to Start Your FVR Program”. It is aimed at beginners. Mike tells me that this project will be finished by late January. We can get the details about how to get it later on when it is ready. Meanwhile, Tina asked Mike
About ten years ago Anne Matava and I started a rich conversation about best practices in this work. We agreed on everything and we still do. Then, when I saw what Anne could do in creating story scripts, I asked her to write what eventually became three very fine volumes of story scripts that some teachers
This is an interesting repost from 2011. It reveals where we were then and allows us to see how far we have come in our thinking in the past five years: Of all the unique things that Malcolm Gladwell has said, his idea that mastery of anything is no more complicated than doing something for
A repost. I once asked Claire Walter to expand on something she had said about how curriculum, instruction and assessment should all go together as a unit. Like they are not three rings in a circus but all in one ring with perhaps a very slight level of Venn diversion, but not much. She replied: Ben,
