Jody has made a point about CWB that seems small but is big. I put it here to make it cross reference with those categories and thus have less chance of being forgotten. She said:

A repost from 2011: When we stir pancake batter, the lumps go away and the batter is smooth. That is what we want to do with our repetitive questions when we circle. Just keep making circles

I posted this in early May and had to push it back until now because the queue was too jammed. It’s starting to get a little unjammed now. I had just visited a classroom where

I was doing a seventy minute story last week as a final exam. We did the story over a period of about fifty minutes and then the kids were to take the remainder of the

Reuben Vyn will be teaching French 1 at iFLT. Watch this guy. He is our best in DPS. He never uses English in the classroom. His exit scores are off the chart. There is an

The amazing Robert Harrell is this month’s Teacher of the Month on the PLC. He is our resident scholar here. The complete fisherman, Robert casts his intellectual net far into the ocean for all of

San Diego Just a few notes from the iFLT website: Housing You can make a room reservation via the TPRS-iFLT conference website at: http://tinyurl.com/TPRS-iFLT If you have not yet booked your hotel, Carol recommends doing

Here is an initiative from our own Laurie. If you are going to Dallas please read: http://www.ntprs.org/ntprs.org/JUST_ONE_BOOK.html

Skip requested that we start an upper level thread to be categorized as such for the fall. We will also try to get some stuff on it in San Diego also. Below is the start, taken

A repost from January, with new blue chip ideas added in: In welcoming Lori to the group this past week, chill said that there is gold in these posts. I am happy and agree. But

We can stop with the freaky focus on the stories. It’s over. It’s not about the story. It’s about the reps on a limited number of structures. It would be about unlimited reps on unlimited

Greg wrote this yesterday: …are we still in agreement that a strong choral response is key?  I think strong responses from everyone will be one of my few main objectives in starting the year next

John relates an experience where he could see how CI gets into “the language parts of the brains”. It’s excellent: Ben, I just wanted to share what I experienced during a camping trip this week

This is a must read: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/22/chicago-school-closings_n_3319755.html Of critical concern is this paragraph: “Their [the children of Chicago] education has been hijacked by an unrepresentative, unelected corporate school board, acting at the behest of a mayor

Bob Patrick sent this. It’s pretty sick: This blows my mind.  Today, posted on the ACTFL web board is a call for University teachers of the first four courses of language to respond to a

My name is Rob Everett and I am wrapping up my first year at the East Bay Waldorf School teaching Grades 1- 8.  I first experienced using CI last year and have loved it. It’s a

Hi Ben, I teach 10th & 11th grade Spanish on Long Island, NY. This year is my third year teaching. After getting my “feet wet” my first year I started doing activities in my classes

Hi Ben, I’m Julie Schonauer and I teach German I-IV at New Philadelphia High School in northeastern Ohio. I’ve been using TPRS since I went to a one day Blaine Ray workshop way back in

Here is a very kick ass end of year story from Dan Navar by way of John Piazza. John sets it up: Ben, A few of us have been exchanging emails about final exams, and

I can see threads for next year on this site already developing: Movie Talk RT Levels 3/4/AP Embedded Reading Flow Charts by James We can say that as the 2012 year ends, we have made

Chill sent this for the Latinists if they haven’t seen it already, which was originally posted on Laurie’s embedded reading blog, to prove how small the world really is: http://ephemeris.alcuinus.net/ Even if we can’t read Latin,

I couldn’t get this in as a comment (that 404 security rule on comments is a pain in the butt) so I made my comment into this post: Daniel said this: Several of our students

Here is Lisa’s bio: I work at St. Leo the Great Catholic school in San Jose, CA. I am the Middle School Spanish teacher I taught in bilingual and dual language primary grades for 14

Lavinia, who is in Newark, NJ, sent her bio: Hi Ben! Thank you again for letting me again observe your classroom! I teach at TEAM Academy Charter Schools: Newark Collegiate Academy in Newark, NJ. I

So if you have been following this thread you will remember that in my high school we got four kids signed up to take the AP exam as practice in level 2. Here is the rest

How can kids benefit from taking the AP? I guess to be able to put down on their transcript that they took the course. Most check the box that prevents the scores from being sent

Why do the teachers and students in high schools seek approval so much? It’s a perfect setting. Actually, everybody in high schools from the kids to the district supervisors up to the superintendent are in it for

It is a bit of a worship thing, where the school gets to have teachers and students commit to long periods of intense training (I wouldn’t call what traditional teachers do with their four percent kids actual teaching

It takes thousands and thousands of hours to be able to handle a language. What does “handle a language” mean? It means to understand it when it is spoken in a natural way by a

I responded to the teacher who described how the AP was given in the last post. Below is that response. I was not trying to fix anything, just responding to her without trying to do

I got this from an AP French teacher a few days ago: Hi, Ben, My students took their French AP yesterday afternoon.  Have you heard from anyone else?   Their proctor, someone I’ve had conflict over

I think Movie Talk is going to be a big hitter for us next year. Some have been testing it out this spring. We would do well to get it going at a higher level next year.

I am always beating the drum about unconscious acquisition. It is the gorilla in the room that few, even those who have been studying Krashen for years, don’t seem to want to own. For them

Judy has a question for the group: Dear Ben, I thought maybe some members of the group could give me some suggestions.  One of my private students is a 14 year old Romanian boy who

The idea of needing thousands of reps and not hundreds for acquisition is Sabrina’s. She brought it up about a week ago in a comment, for those who remember. It’s not a complex idea. Sabrina

Robert has offered some sterling advice on how to deal with administrators: 1. Have  a checklist hanging by the door telling all visitors how exactly to observe your comprehensible input classroom. Ask the evaluator(s) to take one

TPRS  Workshop in France With: Teri Wiechart, Lynnette St. George, Alike Last, Judith Dubois For both beginners and experienced users of TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling)  When? August 6th – August 10th, 2013

Kids don’t really want to watch a video when they clamor for one in the most unpleasant way to start class. They just don’t want to embrace the rigor we are about to offer them

David has shared a video. I really appreciate the thorough explanation of what is going on, his self reflection, and the general way he presents it, which could serve as a model for all of

Oddly, we have assumed that if we give our students enough CI, they will learn the language. And, while CI is definitely the only way that a human being can learn a language, with no

This is new information about CWB and OWI as of May, 2013. It discusses the importance of simplicity in the first few weeks of any school year. I will post this now and also in

As we reach the end of another year, some of us crawling but and some of us running comfortably, I think about what lies below our daily struggles to learn this method. And all I can

Yesterday we graded our writing assessments. In DPS that means getting together all the district language teachers in one big room and, using a super cool assessment rubric that has taken us five years to create

Here is a text taken from an addition I just made to the content of the cRD – 7 article. I thought some explanation of the term “snowplow reading” was in order: The snowplow should

In this last post in the cRD thread, James asks a few questions with my responses below: Two questions: 1) By “snowplowing through the boring parts” do you mean “translate the text into English out

This is another exchange that represents a follow-up to the cRD discussion, Jennifer in NJ asked: I’d also like to know how this fits into the new weekly schedule as of 2013. Ben is saying

This addition to the cRD discussion is in the form of an exchange between Robert and me. I add it to the thread for general interest and clarification: Robert: If the stories are based on

So the process is that the kids read the paragraph quickly, we translate it, all that in five minutes, and then off to the CI races with TPR as long as it goes, then some

Here is an example of cRD. On page 48 of Le Voyage de Sa Vie, the protagonist Jean-Luc is grabbed by the villain La Femme Insecte. The scene I would focus on lasts only three