Ben Slavic

Time to Rest

There is a reason we have long summer breaks in education, a real one that only teachers and students can know. We need them in order to survive. Since ours is emotionally a most demanding profession, we must rest for long periods of time. What we go through during the year in our buildings, in […]

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Movie Talk Update

Michele gives us an update on Movie Talk. For the previous thread on this important topic for next year, click on the category. Here is the update: Hi Ben, I was stunned to find out that iJFLT published an article on Ashley Hastings’ MovieTalk technique in 2006: http://www.tprstories.com/ijflt/IJFLTFall06.pdf Of course, I wasn’t doing TPRS your

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TPR to Begin the Year

Many of us start the year with CWB and OWI and Word Associations and the Word Chunk team game (https://benslavic.com/workshop-handouts.pdf). We need to remember to throw the right amount of TPR into that mix. It’s a deal breaker for the success of our year, along with the Classroom Rules and of course jGR. In a recent comment

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Interview Friday

Angie has a only few days to prepare for an interview coming up on Friday, so make some suggestions. We have had this question before but I’m not sure where it we answered it. Angie maybe you could check here: https://benslavic.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=20465&action=edit&message=1 Hey Ben, I’ve got an interview on Friday and I’ll be teaching a 30 min. class

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Helena Curtain Again

Liam recently shared this sentence with us about talking with Helena Curtain at FLENJ: [Helena] gave a presentation at FLENJ as well, right before mine, in fact. Her presentation (her hallmark thematic unit – which I saw her give several years ago at ACTFL) included several disparaging references to “the TPRS crowd” and she ended,

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Retells

The great value of having the artist’s work to refer to when doing a retell of a story, vs. not having it, is that when the students are focused on the images created by the artist, they completely forget the words and focus only on the meaning, and are thus certainly acquiring. Working with visual

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“New” Research

Cheryl sent this: I saw this and nearly laughed out loud.  It seems that new research indicates that telling kids stories helps them to remember things!! http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/04/why-teachers-should-present-new-material-as-stories/ Cheryl Cowherd

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