Dr. Louisa Walker over there in the SoCal universe has some good news for us tonite: Hi Ben, I want to let you know what happened to me today (from the field). Today was our first day back, inservice day with no students, and 3 Spanish colleagues came to my room to ask me to […]
I’m the Tin Man. I always had a heart but I never knew it. It took people like Susan Gross and Blaine Ray and Laurie Clarcq and Jason Fritze to remind me of it, and to show me how to become real in my classroom. I am the Tin Man and I am the Velveteen
This article contains the verb list (and more) that Eric mentioned in the last article about spending five minutes per day getting reps on certain targeted verbs. Read the first paragraph in particular. I highly recommend doing exactly what it says. Also, if you make a Verb Wall from these, I highly recommend writing them
Here is something Eric Herman has been working on. The name of this activity is from Melissa Sadler. I think that this from Eric is a new blockbuster strategy on the level of jGR and Circling, or just under them. Why? Because our kids HAVE TO KNOW the verbs. They have to because verbs drive
Ben, I just finished my first 3 days of teaching TPRS style and it was amazing! Thanks so much for all of your guidance and support in this process. I must admit that I was a nervous wreck and didn’t sleep well for days before we started back, but it was worth it after seeing
James Hosler has a nice report from the field: Ben and Robert (Patrick): Thank you both for convincing me and helping to adopt teaching with comprehensible input. I am sitting in my last period class right now and just feeling so thankful that I didn’t ruin them with grammar-first teaching. They would have really been
I got this email from Louisa. It’s about presenting at conferences and there is in fact a category here for that here (Presenting to Colleagues on the Method) but I think we should add to that category whenever we can, as this topic is going to come up for many of us in the future.
I have added yet another Primer to the list above, this one by Carol Gaab. Like Robert’s, it is an authoritative statement, a tour de force for those looking to find the perfect response when asked to describe how and why we teach using comprehensible input: http://languagemagazine.com/?page_id=2014 Thank you Chris Stoltz for sending this link
Today an instructional coach in a PD I’m in asked if I would present on jGR to the group. I said of course, and so Annick and Barbara (Vallejos) and Jane (Little) and I will do that next month. The reason I think it is a good idea is that jGR asks of students –
It’s not often that we are able to be observed by supervisors who actually know about comprehensible input. The result has been lots of crossed lines of communication, where the observer, for example, wants to see kids outputting language in class when in reality that possibility is literally thousands of hours away. Another example is
Sabrina reports: “Hi Ben, Since you are on sentence frames I want to share what I’ve been doing on the second day of class with all my kids and it’s worked out quite well to get them back into the swing of language and give them multiple reps. Yesterday I asked them: 1) to write
