Cute Idea #5: The Retell Glove Two kinds of retells* are possible. Most commonly, the instructor or a student simply repeats the events of the story. There is another, more complex, way to retell, one that is widely used in elementary school reading classes and is very adaptable to our work. The instructor makes a […]

Long time PLC members know that over the ten years many of us have been together here, the gradual shift to non-targeted CI and its spiking since 2016 – and its manifestation in terms of the three books now published as featured items by Teacher’s Discovery (Natural Approach to Stories, Natural Approach to the Year/Year

I have actually been doing non targeted comprehensible input for twenty years, from the beginning. I took a real slow pathway to it, trying to do like the others who targeted, to do what I was told at conferences, to fit in, and I fake-targeted, found refuge in Anne Matava’s scripts, tried to believe in

Cute Idea #4: The Window Box Person This idea is best for levels 3 and above: A little window can be built out of a cardboard box. It can be spray-painted and kept in the classroom. The student chosen for the job of window box person grabs the box during class at any appropriate time

No more TPR for me. It has an artificial feeling to it and, like circling, brings up that engagement of the conscious faculty of the learner in the moments of comprehension, which conscious engagement interrupts the flow of the learner’s focus only on meaning, which is a colossal mistake in this work, if I understand

Cute Idea #3: The En Route Event This is different from a whacky transportation scene. When an actor is transitioning from one location to another, funny events can happen: Class, Becky is going through the forest. Does she go by automatic toilet or by toad, class? That’s right, class, she goes by toad (that is

Idea #2: The T-Shirt Phrase Anne Matava’s students in Maine have a classmate named Biddley Flurgenjurgen. Biddley is imaginary. He goes to school with Anne’s students in the class’s imagination for all four years of high school, and appears and reappears in major and minor roles in stories all year, serving a lot of purposes.

We all invent cute little things that reflect our own teaching personalities, little ways to reach the kids in the middle of a story, for example, that make the story more pleasant, that only take a minute or two to do and so can’t be categorized as part of a curriculum in the way that,

For ten years now we have been faithfully enjoying our summer “breather”. It is so important! Teachers as a rule in my opinion have in the past worked too hard for very sparse results. We are changing that now and learning in the process that the best teaching is the simplest and easiest (non-targeted) and

Anyone watching World Cup action these days (I’m watching France and Belgium right now) has seen a variety of soccer styles from the best players on the best national teams in the world. In soccer – or as we will be calling it after the demise of the NFL in the next thirty years, football

I won’t be writing much here over the summer – maybe an occasional report from the field –  but there are ten years of posts here, so no lack of stuff to read, plus the valuable Primers articles above.

Over the summer I recommend that PLC members study this chart by Marianne Van Klaveren, which is an expanded version of the original Star Sequence I developed last summer (2017). It is not linear in nature, but describes a curriculum in spatial terms. This is needed because of the spatial/unconscious way humans learn languages. Teacher’s