One way to deal with grammar obsessed students and parents from the past century is to hand them a grammar book. I did that last year at the American Embassy School very successfully. Here’s how it works: The grammar copter hovers in during the first parents meeting around October and inquires politely, or not so […]
One of the artistic driving forces of the new Invisibles/emergent targets concept was a 6th grader from England – Jack – who last year at the American Embassy School in New Delhi created some memorable images, mainly the famous Vampspooder the Spider. At that time, we weren’t using One Word Images (Kathrin Shechtman’s breakthrough idea
Tim wr0te that he had to weigh his summative assessments at 50% and was asking for some suggestions on how to do that in a CI format. Here is my response: Tim I am thinking that you have a perfect opportunity here to do the summative assessments (I would assume two per year) in the
This is from Tim Geerlings. Any suggestions for him are welcome: I have LOVED watching all of the discussion about assessment this year. Thank you so much to all who have contributed! I have an assessment question. My school is amazingly supportive of TPRS and how I teach. Kids and admin say they are loving
James asked for a repost of this article from earlier this year so here it is: So we are trying out a new idea again. This one involves class competition (CC) in story creation between students of group members, where one class in one language group in one city challenges another to create a better
This is from Jim Tripp: http://shoutout.wix.com/so/7LTkrgH1?cid=a965d1b8-2e6f-4c32-8f5f-557dbe40c631®ion=40918052-1695-4df1-a228-adb061258d25#/main
When we focus merely on how we are doing the method or, worse, on just recreating the story script itself in class, perhaps we miss the entire point of storytelling. In my view, the real point of this work is not to focus on the method or the materials or something in some curriculum document
Bail Out Move #4: How is That Spelled? Teaching the alphabet does nothing for acquisition of the language. And yet district benchmarks often include teaching the alphabet, so it must be taught. Here is a way to teach the alphabet while at the same time allowing you to temporarily bail out of some auditory instruction
Here is a four panel image created by the artists in our Portland workshop. I can’t remember the story, but the reason I post it here is to ask anyone working with emergent stories if they, because we want to keep our stories shorter with the Invisibles (25 min. is the ideal), agree with me
We must align our instruction with our curriculum and with our assessment. The three must go together. This I learned from Claire Ensor and she, I think, from John Biggs. We cannot teach using CI and then turn around and assess and design curriculum with a non-CI approach. Our curriculum designs and our current assessment
When students sense that the instructor is attempting to force learning on them, they instinctively draw back. In the moment they draw back, distance is created, and discipline problems can result. We must find a way to draw our students into the learning. If we focus on the solution, one day we will go into
