Remember when you were little and sometimes you played ball, learning about throwing and catching? You even threw it to people. And they caught it sometimes! And YOU caught it sometimes! Lets’ break that down in terms of what was happening in your two year old self’s language acquisition process, which, at two years, was rolling […]
jen has a question for us. We owe her, for her awesome jGR, so answer her well: So today, out of the blue, the new French teacher (who has in level 3 the group that I had doing CI for 1.5 out of their first two years) came to ask for some advice. I am
Carol suggests that we talk about getting some ideas for writing. We don’t have many. It’s a good idea: ….when it comes to the baby steps of writing that eventually morph into the upper level writing, there are not many comments aside from timed writing. Could anyone comment on how and when they get their
Jody does this thing where she interviews her kids. It’s a good one: I never “circle” in reading. (I have a lot of reasons for not doing it, but I don’t believe there are any “rules” associated with this one way or the other.) We just translate; I ask a few comprehension questions, and perhaps
This suggestion from Ben Lev addresses a problem that I am sure most of us have without even being aware of it: Yesterday in the middle of a story I was getting great response from the same handful of students and mediocre response from the large middle group. I explained in English to my student
A minor but super important thread to me in the past few weeks here has been the one on the rich wanting to hire their own Latin tutors and keeping instruction like it was in the 18th century. If you are aware of that thread, you may want to read on, as Jody shares an interesting YouTube video
David’s brilliant idea also made me want to share what Anne wrote in the appendix to her story script books – a step by step way of scripting our own stories. Anne has always felt that we all should be able to write our own scripts because we are the only ones who know our
Melissa sends great news: Just thought I’d share my success. I had a breakthrough day today circling. I was circling likes and focused on food. It was awesome. We ended up in one class with Diego likes to eat oreos everyday in the bathroom because they give him power. It was awesome. It took the
We welcome Erin to the discussion and thank you for the bio, Erin: Ben, I joined your group a couple weeks ago, and I wanted to introduce myself and let you know what a fantastic resource it has been. I am currently in my fourth year of teaching middle and high school Spanish in a
Here is a repost of an article from 2009. I was reading some of Michael Fullan’s work and saw in it support of what we are going though in TPRS/CI. I am hearing from Fullan that: 1. Shared leadership is essential. This means, to me, no camps and no secrecy. Open and honest dialogue about teaching, and
Diane Neubauer wrote this here yesterday: I just attended a one-day conference with Helena Curtain as the speaker. She talked about the 90%+ guideline, why, and how to get through challenges to using the target language that much. She used the term comprehensible input and made strong compliments to what she called “old” TPRS, with
Highly recommended: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/watch-teacher-infiltrates-alec-education-meeting-confronts-members
