I propose a motto for our group for 2017: You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.  Plato

We have fought long and hard for ten years here in our PLC on behalf of kids. As we get ready to crank up yet another year of discussion, I want to thank everyone who has stayed along for the ride and anyone who has just recently joined us. Our dream of a private place where

Erin Nielson in Connecticut just shared with me this email, very useful information for those with pdf files of my books, so thank you Erin for sharing it with the group: …I figured out that yes, I can send my pdf downloads from you to my Kindle.  Each Kindle has an email associated with it and

Our classes are based on a creative community that we lead.  In all communities, the members play different roles, and bring different strengths to the group.  We create stories together, but some kids are stronger co-creators. We laugh, but some kids get more of the humor. We have strong eye contact, but some have stronger

Here is a link to Alisa’s blog. It’s a fine article for us to keep in mind as we get ready to crank the comprehensible input engines up again: Motherese

Here’s Paul’s report from Utah and it will drop a few jaws: Hi Ben, I’ve been trolling the PLC with more rigor for the last few weeks since we have been back in school and I am so indebted to you and the PLC for all the ideas that I am taking and have taken

As we often do at certain times of the year, let’s take a little break. We’ve been working hard, teaching hard, finding things out about ourselves and this method, sometimes gnashing our teeth and sometimes, when riding the wave of a good story,  wondering why everybody doesn’t teach this way. We’re doing good things. Deep

The question is about how to best create the problem in Questioning Level 5. Here is a much better answer than the one given back then, which was mealy-mouthed: Having utilized the One Word Image to create a detailed drawing of a character, we are most likely at that point to be about ten to twelve minutes

A repost from 2012: I’ve been wondering why storytelling is so challenging.  But then I thought that, for the past few hundred years at least, the modus operandi of teachers has been to simply intimidate kids in classrooms. (Tolstoy recalled his years in school as “the worst of his life…filled with endless boring tasks.”) Think of

A repost from 2011: There is a ton of merit to starting a class with one good verb and staying there. Let’s take the verb “to drink”. So you start off class and you can go into all sorts of highly personal discussion right away. You can ask kids what they drink. You can do

Ryann continues: I don’t have the energy for conflict or a battle, and I don’t feel like defending what I do to parents or administrators who don’t understand it, and I don’t have the personality for the conflict…should it get out there.  I know I “get it” but I am not strong at articulating it

Thanks to Christina most of the Director’s Cues have been translated into Spanish. There remain these to translate, if anyone has the time and thanks in advance: victoriously bowing with hand in air embarrassed thankfully grumpy itchy mysteriously exhausted tired while falling asleep upset calmly in a silly fashion sweetly cuddly with tiny hands with