Ben Slavic

James’ Other Sites

I went over to James Hosler’s site and found another site by him but in Latin, and then another one for his students. He even spoke some Latin on a short clip. I understood two words – mea culpa. I have to think this is what they sounded like a few thousand years ago. It […]

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Student Observors

I invite students in one class to visit other of my classes, if their schedule allows, if there is nothing being done in some class, etc. They sometimes take me up on it. Today a student sat in on my 9th pd. class and just observed. When he left, he said, “Good class, Mr. Slavic!”

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We Are the Adults

I am in a language lab right now on my planning period. The class in here, a heritage speakers class, is all out of control when they are supposed to be using the computers to do a writing  assignment in Spanish. It is  chaos in here, but the (very young first year teacher) is on

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Darren Drago

Darren’s bio: I am totally for CI. I have been teaching Spansish for 13 years. I started using TPRS in about 2002 or 2003. I love it. I was in a high school setting for several years. It was tough being the only TPRS teacher, you know all the teachers doing the grammar thing. When I

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On the Writing Skill

I really like the way, in this method, how the kids can write phonetically and then when we work on writing directly, after the story and after the reading, it all cleans up really nicely. Unless they have heard it first with lots and lots of reps with full meaning to them, they can’t write, nor should they

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Walls

Somebody asked me what I have up on my walls. Not much. I once had many posters up and slowly figured out that they don’t work. The extreme nut on too many posters was a teacher at East High who had just about every single inch of his wall covered with verb conjugations of all kinds. Thousands

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Candy Hearts 2

This is the same script but the version below has been slightly modified by James and with a Latin version added below. ENGLISH receives a letter doesn’t care _ receives three gifts on Saint Valentine’s day. _ receives the first gift from _. The first gift is _. A letter is on the gift. In the

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Candy Hearts 1

Candy Hearts stuck to Spell it! I don’t care Carl receives a Valentine from Miley Cyrus. There is a piece of candy stuck to the card. Bobbie asks Carl what the candy says. Carl says, “I don’t know.” Bobbie says, “Spell it!” So Carl spells it out, “C-A-L-L-M-E” Bobbie says, “Whoa, it says ‘Call Me’!”

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Keep On Truckin’

We know that in ELA instruction and in too many “CI” classes what they do is pile up the truck full of rocks and naturally most of them spill out on the road. What we  do with CI, on the other hand, is to put just a few rocks in the truck and then they magically multiply by rolling

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Video Release Forms

On the class competition thing we must have releases. Below is the one I use – it may not be perfect but it’s what I use – and I absolutely won’t put up a video even in this private internet space unless I have one for every kid whose face (back of the head is

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