A colleague wrote: I always come back from workshops thinking, “I’m at least that good! I can organize lessons like these!” And then when I get home to my own classroom, I find that I’m

K responds to my comment here yesterday. I like the term she coined to describe real (CI, speech based) grammar – “language acquisition grammar” – that’s the opposite of the plastic/rules based grammar and a

Hey Mr. Slavic, I have epiphanies in weird places. I know that that is a weird introduction, but it’s true. Last week at lunch, a few kids asked if there were grammar activities in TPRS

An update from K – sorry about the delay here – the queue has been very full lately: Today was really cool for 2 reasons: 1. In addition to my teacher and the other French teacher,

My first two classes with Karen Rowan observing (yikes!) stank. But good kinds of stinkers, because I learned from them. I was trying to be too cool, too adept at a way of teaching I

A good bail out if a story isn’t working is a dictation (this site/resources/workshop handouts). But Read and Discuss kicks major butt for bailing out also, because you always have the translation text to return to in

If you read that earlier blog entry entitled Lynn 1, you knew that the story would have a happy ending. That is because, in the tone of Lynn’s writing, between the lines, is the wonderful

Lynn wrote me a few weeks ago: On Thursday one of my grade 9 boys came to me and said he wanted to transfer out. My heart stopped. I felt awful.  I’ve been asking him questions,

I got this email from Elissa that I wanted to share: This is so much bigger than teaching a language. I think that’s why I feel ignited about teaching Spanish in a way I hadn’t

The link below will explain why: 1. we sometimes have trouble reaching our kids in a reciprocal, social, participatory way in our classrooms. 2. we need not blame ourselves for not reaching them all. 3.

K writes: For all inquiring minds: I have good news and bad news. The cumulative test was today. It consisted of 100 or so vocabulary words,and conjugations of ER verbs, avoir, aller, and être. It

I had asked Laurie for some of the activities on the Embedded Reading thread. Those now following that can find that information here: http://blog.heartsforteaching.com/2010/01/21/for-ben-by-request.aspx It’s a busy end of the week but I hope to

Apparently this is going to become a movie. Hee hee. You know, why not? Here is this awesome girl racing down a hallway and falling just to prove a point. It could be a good movie!

This is a reprise of that blog when Jennifer and I were talking about pacing guides: I think that pacing guides, in general, prevent any real instructional freedom and any cogent alignment with the research of Dr.

Laurie’s Not Teaching Parrots Got this from Laurie -it’s on her blog (http://blog.heartsforteaching.com) too: I’m a bit of a youtube addict and yesterday I came across this great clip about a speaking parrot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kyh8KblQrqQ The

This is blog entry number four from my fearless former eighth grade student who has been sharing her views of studying French as a ninth grader in her high school. (Search “A Blow To His

Magic Johnson has said that, as he grew up, there were a lot of people who “shot down my dreams”.  How many dreams of young kids of color to succeed at foreign languages have been

I got this email from Jennifer a few days ago. It is pretty interesting: “Ben, I wanted to thank you again for all your time and energy over the last year and a half, on

When we have the time to write up stories as readings (Step 3), we embellish the original story line with personalized details about kids in the class. They want to know what they did and

This is a follow up email to the one yesterday. In it, we see an excellent restatement of the author’s original point: “Thanks for the compliment. I cannot wait until those new standards are passed.

This email from a colleague addresses the simple idea that if we teach numbers by themselves, the kids will learn only the numbers. But, if we teach the actual language, our kids will learn both numbers

If a cow is in the fields and you want it to give milk, you don’t talk to it about the various kinds of grass to eat, analyzing with it the soil that the grass

Elissa asked me to post this great question: Hello community of TPRSers- The 7th and 8th grades in my school will be traveling to Costa Rica in May. (Yes, I get to go with them!)

The tidal waves of change away from grammar and book based instruction are no longer coming, they are here. We in TPRS can take a deep breath. Each state is in a slightly different place

Typically, teachers who go to the trouble of making TPRS work for them experience, as a result of that effort, larger class sizes. There is no need to even mention, in this regard, the precipitous drops experienced in

Here’s the thing: we have this computer in our minds, far greater, infinitely greater, than the most sophisticated computers ever built, and we go around thinking that we as teachers can impact the language output

Robert tried to comment on the thread “Playing Tennis” but it disappeared somewhere so I am just putting it here as a regular blog entry: At the risk of over-intellectualizing the discussion, here are a

I was conversing in French with a student after school today. As a French 4 student soon going to France on a trip, she was concerned because she said that she had, up until this