Building a sense of community in our classrooms guarantees good physical health and good mental health for us and our children. Teachers burn out when they are not in strong community, because they sense that

There are at least two words in French that mean “suddenly”: tout-à-coup soudain I would assume that this might be true in other languages. Here is an idea that Sabrina shares with us to teach those words,

Yesterday when my class got into a chant (call and response) they remembered entire lines from a Matava story we did in the fall. I couldn’t believe it. The community we have built in that

Hey whatever happened to Kindergarten Day? We forgot about it! Does anyone still do it? We got so busy with the CI that we forgot one of our best CI tools! Oh man, what a thing to

I actually have asked all of my classes to read the Language of the Trees # 1 post. They know that we have our online community here, and they like to hear what we are

Carol has approved a session led by Claire, Tina and I on authentic assessment at the conference. We’re calling it “Assessment in the CI Classroom”. Anyone in on the recent thread or anyone in the

Anna Matava has said; …Star of the Week has been my entire curriculum for a group of 7 upper-level students since mid-March. I’ve never seen anything quite like it for building esprit de corps and

So I am just following up on that class. Two kids left making me promise that their characters will be in the story next class. We got into a chant. I was doing the Star

So my sixth graders just came in for an hour and a half of fun. Of course, we’ll burn ten minutes at least with SSR. The greatest language gains will happen now during these awesome

I wrote this to John and the few others who might be experiencing May stress: John I have found solace these last pew weeks in Star of the Week. No planning. I don’t even sit a

I can’t believe we’ve done this to ourselves. I can’t believe we have taken such a simple thing as telling a story and turned it into a military exercise. We have made it so complicated!

Amanda Baumann is our elementary French instructor here at the American Embassy School and very much aware of group dynamics in a classroom. She is the one who told me about David Kohl’s work The

This rubrics/assessment thread is like trying to stop a freight train but I do feel honestly that we need a break from it as discussed here yesterday. Let me share what I am comprehending so

I just picked up a nice little detail about reading stories. As you prepare the reading from the story, make deliberate mistakes, three or four per paragraph. Tell the kids, “There are three mistakes in

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/10/477449865/in-polluted-new-delhi-triathlete-weighs-costs-of-exercising-outside?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=morningedition&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160510

Instead of being cooped up in the train, staring at each other all day, which is very much what happens to CI teachers who are following lesson plans in their classrooms, when we do targetless

In order to fully integrate into my psyche the changes we have been talking about this year, and in order to be able to integrate the changes that we are going to make next year, if

As we all wind up our individual years, with so little time to do much more than compile grades, fill out end of year reports, and have inane conversations with posers who can’t figure out

Alisa sent this nice and simple rubric:

It’s all about fear. Either we raise the freak flag on our boats as each story chugs out of the CI harbors each day, or we don’t. If we want the good stuff, we –

The link below – I republish it here like once a month as a reminder – holds one of the master keys, in my opinion, to TPRS. No joke. I see what is expressed in

A few pithy one liners from Claire this past week. Things we need to look at: ..we can’t just talk about assessment without addressing curriculum…. …curriculum, assessment, and instruction, which all have to fit together or

We can’t do this work simply because we have learned some CI skills. They are not enough. The focus, I might even call it an obsession, with the skills causes us to forget an even

Since I had no idea where the Mr. Positive story was going, I was able to go along into interesting places with this story only because I didn’t know where it was going. Even more important to

I wrote that Language of the Trees post after observing and coaching our WL Department Chair Zach Al Moreno last week with a group of sixth grade beginners in Spanish. As he taught, Zach gave

Once in Montreal I visited a French high school with my students from South Carolina and met and spent some time with the censeur (notice the word) as he was doing his thing of being

I’ll be gone this weekend.

We were talking about how TPRS lesson plans and target structures squeeze the life out of stories, creating in new teaches think that TPRS is hard to do and formulaic and they need to learn

Angie shared a video with us. She reports: My colleague filmed my Block 2 class today.  It’s long, but has many parts.  PQA, reading and discussion, partner reading, and Movie Talk.  It’s definitely a weird

I can’t find anywhere in Krashen, although I don’t have much time any more to look thoroughly, where he talks about communication as awareness. There is one passage that is kind of connected. This is

Alisa saw this and sent it to me. It’s not just the air here: http://www.npr.org/2016/05/11/477415686/can-indias-sacred-but-dead-yamuna-river-be-saved

Here is another picture report from the field, like John’s, of me sitting in my classroom:

With my own boys if there was ever any sense in me that they don’t need school that day, for whatever reason, I supported that. But the school always made me somewhat guilty. I accepted that

That first post about the grove of trees is an attempt to get deeper into the nature of communication, which is the overarching standard in our profession, and yet one that I am sure is not

This report from the field is in the form of a picture. John Piazza reports from Berkeley High School (CA): Hi Ben, I wanted to share this pic with you, because I think that you will

Along with reading (less interesting to the kids but vital), Star of the Week (much more interesting to the kids) may hold the key to the upper level CI class activity conundrum. It may hold

We need to ASK THEM what they want to talk about before we start talking. This is as per Star of the Week. Why not ask THEM what questions they want to be asked? It’s

So we were talking about how lesson plans lead to less interesting classes in TPRS. Canned TPRS lesson plans are based on insecurity about what is going to happen in the class. In that way, it

This is going up on the Primers hard link and also staying here as a sticky post for awhile. Since it is in the Primers, we can all just go and copy it when we

I usually write volumes here and apologize for that. But today I am getting one of those crystal clear insights about this work. So here it is: Let’s just enjoy this work. Before stories we

It’s about time that Robert had his own blog site and so this is to announce its launch this week. I will be a regular reader, as many of us will be, since we know very well

Two of the biggest things that make a story interesting to the kids in a TPRS class are the elements of suspense and surprise. But if the one directing the story, asking the questions, making

Who has oppressed us, who are asleep at the testing barrier? Oh, nobody in particular, except the textbook companies and a legion of freak memorizers-turned-language-teachers who don’t want us to wake up and who now

One might ask right about now, “Who has time to read the recent barrage of articles and comments on authentic assessement? I’m too busy!” I would ask, “Who can risk not reading them?” Why? Because we

Diane Neubauer was listening to the Tea with BVP show last week and reported back to us here: …they had done a poll of people following them on Twitter. If I remember correctly, 85% either said

Russ and Alisa made a couple of points that would be well go ponder before we give our next assessment on a story: Russ: “I think we need to differentiate between language and content. The students

We will link this article to the Super Mini Stories category and keep adding them in here for ease of reference next year: 1. Eating Kittens (Diane Neubauer): (students need: would like to/wants to eat,

An April 29 ruling from the country’s top authority on labor issues says that employers cannot require employees to be constantly positive at work.  …requiring that employees act positive, regardless of working conditions, isn’t allowed. If

Just read this from Claire. Then think about it next time you do a story. Then act.  Little girls feeling like they’re just a distraction in school is not okay. Until we do what Robert