Anyone in the Denver metro area – you don’t have to be a DPS teacher – is invited to observe Mark Mallaney, one of our best Spanish teachers, next Tuesday the 20th for two morning classes from 10:30 to 12:15. Meet in the office of Denver School of the Arts at 10:15. There is also […]
So much time is spent in schools planning curricula. It’s like a bunch of chefs back in the kitchen trying to find the right menu to please the customers. They think that if they just serve the right food, their restaurant will be a success. Maybe that’s true for the chefs, but education doesn’t function
Diane shares three video links of her doing Listen and Draw with a Chinese 4 class on YouTube: “In a Chinese 4 class I once filmed, I had two targets: “outside the city” and “not far from the mountains”. I had noticed my students were not confident about locational phrases, which in Chinese have two
Diane describes some follow up activities that can come from Listen and Draw: As mentioned, many kinds of activities can easily be built off of Listen and Draw. The basic idea is to describe a scene that all students sketch as it is slowly being described. Plenty of repetition is easily possible. It’s better to
Diane continues her description of Listen and Draw: “With my distracted, bouncing-off-the-walls class I think this might become a permanent part of the PQA process in my classroom. I almost always try to review some of the drawings the next day as a class warm up before the story.” James Hosler has added an excellent
Diane continues her description of Listen and Draw: “Since then, I’ve found it helpful to shorten the description and include two sketches – about 4-6 sentences, and maybe 5-8 minutes needed to complete each. With classes that can play, story-asking for the specific details is great. My current 7th grade class is excellent at that.
Diane continues her description of Listen and Draw: “Describing and sketching such a detailed scene took about 20-25 minutes. As a follow-up, I asked the students to show a classmate and describe it in Chinese for 1 minute. Then, I took volunteers who re-told their sketch to the whole class, pointing out features in their
Diane Neubauer has described an activity that we all could use in our CI classrooms, not just as a strategy but also as a bail out move. Diane presented on this at ACTFL in Texas last November, but somehow it slipped under the radar here, so here it is in the form of six articles.
Our PLC member Jeanette Borich in Iowa has written an important article about what we do. Published in Education Week in 2012, it got picked up on a heavily visited ESL site by Larry Ferlazzo. Chris Stolz in Vancouver told me about it: (Teaching Foreign Language Through Storytelling, Education Week, April 02, 2012) A veteran
Bryan Whitney shares: Bonjour Ben! Here’s a link to a presentation that I put together that I’m going to use for some Look & Discuss. I thought the rest of the group might enjoy this. It’s pretty funny. I think the kids will get a kick out of it too. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8iMgKGzPTxaY1AzUWE3N0xtbWs/view?usp=sharing I used the images
Brigitte Kahn shares: Dear Ben, This is along the lines of Alisa’s post from the other day. I am a member of the planning committee for the Annual NY State FL Conference. This year, there seems to be a shortage of presenters for the 75-minute workshops. I was wondering if you would be willing to
Zach Zaitlin has a good question for the group: I teach Spanish in grades 1-8 at a small private school. I’ve been thinking of purchasing Cuéntame or some other TPRS curriculum (but leaning pretty strongly toward that one) for use, in particular with my 3rd/4th grade class. I’ve tried to find reviews or feelings about Cuéntame
