I call the Monday after a break Snarky Monday. The kids just seem to get basted with an extra layer of snark over the break – who knows why? Since trying the same stuff that our classes were doing before a vacation doesn’t always work for those first few days after the vacation, I wait

Here is a link to Michael’s blog where he gives more information about how to do Two Truths and a Lie: http://optimizingimmersion.com/two-truths-and-a-lie-2/ For the record and I could be wrong but the originator of the Special Person activity is Jody Noble and Sabrina Janczak to my knowledge along with Nina Barber originally authored the Two

Linda Li used Sabrina’s Two Truths and a Lie today. I observed one of the classes. She first modeled the activity, using a power point slide show, saying that she: Met the Dali Lama (who was in Delhi) Ate a lot of pizza Went to the hospital The kids asked a lot of questions, drawing

Sabrina reports: “Hi Ben, Since you are on sentence frames I want to share what I’ve been doing on the second day of class with all my kids and it’s worked out quite well to get them back into the swing of language and give them multiple reps. Yesterday I asked them: 1) to write

Today I mustered up my courage to tell Annick Chen, our gifted superstar TPRS teacher of Mandarin at Abraham Lincoln High School, that I am done with the composition books. It suddenly hit me how useless they are, really. They are one of those vestiges of the past. Annick didn’t bat an eyelash. She said she completely

This information is from The Big CI Book. It gives proper credit to Jody Noble. Jody’s idea – dating from about 2001 – was (certainly unintentionally) appropriated by many TPRS teachers over the years so that now it is known as the “Special Person” activity. But if you read through what is below, you will

(Note: This was published after Thanksgiving but will work equally well after the Winter and Spring breaks as well. In my opinion there is no better way to start in with CI after a vacation than with some variation of Two Truths and a Lie as described below.) We must make the re-entry process after

This post is for people attending my three day intensive workshops. It is to save them the trouble of having to take photos of the posters on the walls. The topics with an asterisk are the things with which Tina and I expect you to be fully confident, having practiced them, when the three days are

Of course this is much more than can be done in two blocks. More like 10. But it gives the sequence, a very valuable one in my opinion that has been cooking for at least four years and is now ready to serve as each individual CI chef wishes: Block 1: FVR Grammar Translation Word

Ruth and I had a side conversation in the comment fields earlier tonight about question words in relation to the overall discussion about Linda Li’s recent Two Truths and a Lie classes here in our school, where her kids were knocking it out of the park with speech output (because of the super high – what I

An exchange in the comment fields between Jim and Ruth yesterday was very rich. In it, they addressed the need to let things develop within the narration of the story. How to do that? They also address the idea of possibly using images to stabilize the story creation process. Ruth addressed the need to correctly manage actors

Please find below an extensive discussion about grading when using either the Middle School Square or the High School Star. You’ll need coffee, since this may be the single longest blog post I’ve shared, and I’ve been sharing these posts since 2004.  This information is the result of 40 years of intense personal introspection and