Ben Slavic

The Free Write bar graph, at the bottom of this list, needs a credit. But it’s been around for at least 15 years. Any ideas who invented it? These charts give an idea of the essence of the just-finished tome:

Well, the book is done. Again. It is in its fourth or fifth state of being finished. Carly and Alisa have been instrumental in making suggestions and I cannot thank them enough. Both are amazing readers. Carly suggested breaking the book into two pieces. It was the perfect suggestion. There are now two books of

Someone asked this question about a requirement that she is going to have to do next year in her building: Q. We are going to have to start to have learning targets each day/week and the kids are going to have forms to fill out explaining how they have reached that learning target….I need to figure out

I repost this from time to time; it first appeared in TPRS in a Year! – For thousands of years, children learned languages by listening to them. Their listening was the exact right curriculum for them, and the word “curriculum” was never even mentioned. Meaningful speech that they could understand with zero effort was all

When we work from lesson plans and word lists we put a blanket over precisely that part of ourselves that we are trying to uncover in our professions – the joyful part. It is an unavoidable part of that misguided (in terms of the research) effort. Krashen calls the effect of such targeted “a constraint

So, what to do when the observer walks in and you are enjoying a discussion about the something completely unrelated to your subject matter with you students? The answer is that we use Total Physical Response (TPR). We want to fool the observer into thinking that we were doing TPR before they came in. If

I know that we don’t get observed much at this time of year, but this information may come in handy at some point next year: How to respond to those electric moments when observers walk into our classrooms unannounced and the class is not focused and needs to be brought into immediate focus without the

Those who have an advance copy of my new book on the Invisibles: please delete it from your files as it is now way out of date. Thanks for all the suggestions. Most have been implemented in the new text. If you want the new version, let me know in a few weeks as I

Kristi Lentz Taylor poses a question that I’ve never heard before. Hopefully we can shed some light on it: I am a homeschool TPRS teacher new to the group. In one of my homeschool teaching settings, a colleague in the home (housecleaner) is a skilled and trained teacher in her home country in Honduras. I

When you are teaching a class using comprehensible input, new words or word chunks will naturally pop into your mind. The general rule of thumb is to resist saying those new words. If you say them just because they pop up into your mind without scaffolding them or supporting them in some way, your students

Below is a writing activity by Bob Patrick (Atlanta) that I have chosen to include in the new star sequence book as one of its four “top quality” extension activities. Please look it over and provide comments in the comment fields below. Like Carly’s Carrot activity, it burns a few days at a time of

I am still tinkering with my latest book. I would appreciate feedback on this printable download, if anyone would mind testing it in class and making comments in a comment field below. Here are the instructions: GENERAL: Have a few sentences prepared using information generated during the Create phase. Students hear each sentence three times but write it