John Piazza brought up a great topic in this repost from 2012: Ben, I was speaking with a colleague recently, a math teacher, who is helping her middle school age daughter decide which language to take, Spanish, French or Mandarin at another school. I told her that, in my opinion, having a good teacher is […]

Tina is organizing two conferences this summer in addition to 12 regional two or three day trainings. The Cascadia CI conference is in Portland at the end of June. The Indigenous CI Conference the week before that is in Locust Grove, Oklahoma. Tina describes the purpose of the Portland conference below: The conference is designed for

Starting class from an image and not from a word or group of words is expansive. The story counts, not the targeted words. Thus, there is greater potential for a story when we start class with an image. Stories that can expand in any direction are far more interesting than stories that reduce the language

To clear up a bit of confusion, we first create One Word Images, which is an all class activity, and then we make Invisibles stories from them, and then after that we invite the kids to make their own individually created characters, and then make more Invisibles stories from them. In my experience the best Invisibles

Here’s a tiresome topic that we never seem to get tired of: Ben, I just got done going through your Big CI Book. I found it incredibly useful as my Spanish department is getting to make “the shift” to CI/IPA. We are still working through our many questions and strategies for our big move for

I got this from someone new to our group and new to the Invisibles. My responses are in italics: Hi Ben, I really appreciate the Invisibles book. I read the whole thing in one evening! I also went back to your videos on YouTube. I was blown away by the Pringle Man video. While I’ve

Last night I went up to Estes Park (CO) to watch my 19 year old son Evan sing in the spring musical for his high school, Eagle Rock School. His voice, over the years, has developed into a very rich deep baritone. But what impressed me most was his dancing and acting. Upon reflection, what

This is a third repost. I’m just going to keep reposting it: I took the “Suggest Cute Answers” rule off of my Classroom Rules.. It never really worked and made many kids feel uncomfortable, as if they couldn’t relax under this heavy class requirement. Tina supports my decision below: Ben, I got rid of the

Dear CI Colleagues, I did Story Listening with all my classes Monday. Their exit ticket was to tell me something that worked well for them as a learner of the target language (French or Spanish). I only had a few students in all my classes that told me negative feedback. Most were very excited with

We won’t know that they all understood until we teach a class that ends with great enthusiasm expressed by all. It isn’t just a good story that generates such happiness, it’s that they all got it. Like jen said in a comment here once that there is great humor in things like funny names and

If you are using OWI and the Invisibles and are at all confused about how the two terms interface, it is understandable. We can say that one word images are really just class created-characters. So when you see OWI anywhere, just think “class-created image”, whether you use it to start an Invisibles story or just

Kids will do anything not to be excluded on hand comprehension checks, even lie on hand checks. It is our responsibility to build that inclusion in our classrooms not just via personalization but also by going slowly enough so that they all get it.