Ben Slavic

I publish this link here so that anyone interested in attending iFLT in Chattanooga this summer can check out who is presenting: https://tprstorytelling.com/conference/presenters-2016/

This is from the West Coast Bear: Hi Ben, Here’s a little circling exercise that I wrote up. Share it if you like. The language is Sindarin (the version of Elvish used in Middle Earth by the Third Age). I challenge any of the “just try harder“ people to get this without help. (I included

A post appeared here a few days ago on how it feels to not understand anything in a grammar class: https://benslavic.com/blog/how-does-it-feel-to-not-understand/ Jim then reminded us of Robert Harrell’s grammar quiz for teachers, which can be given to teachers who teach using the old grammar model of teaching languages. So if you get into one of those

Recently kale has become the food to eat. Food researcher Mike Anderson, in his important book The Rave Diet, has made that claim for over twenty years. He claims that the closer one gets to a diet of pure dark leafy greens, the better one’s health. Recently TPRS has become the way to teach a

This is from a pamphlet by Bev Adcock & Michael L. Remus on disabilities awareness: Make a paper copy for each student of the “German Test” below. Hand out the “German Test.” Discuss how it felt to be given a German test and told to “try harder.” Did that help them do it? How many

My 18 year old son has had a difficult time of it in high school. He is gifted. No doubt, having me as a dad didn’t help him go all bright and bushy tailed about school, hearing me bitch and complain about schools all the time growing up. Now Evan is in an experiential school

Tina wrote this to me in an email this morning about kids who have not been trained from the beginning with TPRS. I find it quite poignant: …poor lil things.  Those high school Spanish kids[I taught] broke my heart.  They were beyond repair after two-three years of “regular” Spanish.  I had to quit [ed. note: Tina

For upper level kids as a fun break. Not intended for input gains, just some fun for kids who have at least a couple of years of language and who want a change in activities. This doesn’t work with large classes of unruly kids, obviously, but if you have a small group of kids who

Chris Stolz looks a lot like a 6’2″ John Lennon, only handsomer. The dude is on a mission and here he shares with us something he recently posted on his blog, the link to which is here: https://tprsquestionsandanswers.wordpress.com/ Salut, prof! I hope all is well in New Smelhi. Your clean Colorado roadie lungs must be

I now have a strong desire to share what I have learned about TPRS with as many people as I can back home, in earnest and with intensity (intentionally). Since I will have the time to go around and do that next year, I look forward to visiting as many schools back home as I can with my

I just resigned, had the resignation meeting, etc. this morning and it was most difficult but I got through it. As I sat there talking to Paul Chmelik and Beth Coyle, the school director and principal of the middle school respectively, it occurred to me that this place, the American Embassy School in New Delhi,

This is from jen. It has value to us on two levels: (1) it teaches us how to stop fake listening to our kids, and (2) if we continue to fail to hear what our students are really communicating to us in class, on many levels even if they don’t know the language, then we can use