Brian Barabe has been doing this work for almost twenty years and really gets it. It is so nice to hear from him once again in this report from Chandler, Arizona: Hey Ben – I have given various TPRS related presentations at the fall conference of AZLA, the Arizona Language Association since 2005. Two years […]
An option for how you use free writes: Divide classes into teams of four or five. Read two or three sentences from a free write (editing for correctness on the fly). The winning team is the one which listens the best and produces the drawing with the most correct details from what was read aloud. Students
I got this comment from a colleague: Ben – It was a huge revelation to read your book (The Big CI Book) and finally see it all brought together. I always knew I hated the textbook language study model but I didn’t really know what to do. Your book explains it. It explains the philosophy.
Mindee asked: Could someone help me with the idea of assessing via word count. I’m going to pretest w/a series of pictures (story) and ask kids to write as much as they can about the picture. I’ll do it again at the end of the year. How do I know what is a reasonable amount
Angie Pidgeon has seen lots of ideas come and go on this PLC. Here is her assessment of the new Invisibles idea: Hi, Ben!! The invisibles are a hit in my high school Spanish classes in San Angelo, Texas. I teach Spanish 2 and Spanish 2 Pre-AP. And the stories are BETTER in the on-level
A repost: In the spirit of wasting time in class in favor of self care and fun with the kids, I offer this game, which is done entirely in English: With beginning kids, when explaining to kids that everything (in French at least) is either masculine or feminine, I tell them that I will say a
A repost from 2013: I think that it is the rule rather than the exception that teachers new to the profession might tend to write exactly what Bradley wrote here a few weeks ago: ……I don’t want to give up, but I’m really feeling pain right now…. For we who have some major miles on
Ours can no longer be referred to as the “red-headed stepsister” of the field of education. Au contraire, we are poised now, with the advent of CI as it becomes more each day accepted as the way people acquire languages, to reform life for a good percentage of our students. Why? It is because, unlike
In the Los Angeles workshop during one of the sessions when we were talking about the power of images and especially those that the kids create (the Invisibles), someone mentioned something about a book called The Arrival. They may even use it in their CI classes. Craig West has found a PDF version of that
Many of the teachers exploring comprehension based instruction today have to attempt to manage the grand transition from the way they themselves were taught languages in high school and college to working with comprehensible input in their classrooms and at the same time deal with the vibe of the dark lords (yes, there are great administrators
A repost from 2011 that still applies: Robert has distinguished between a participation grade and a grade, in his words, that is “based on a set of observable criteria (behaviors) that demonstrate communicative competency based on the ACTFL Performance Guidelines for Grades K-12?. This is a grade that aligns with the Interpersonal Skill of the
A repost from years ago from Bryce, who as usual helps us all build confidence in all aspects of our teaching with comprehensible input in his uniquely positive way. In addition, he reminds us about those “have not” kids who, in our CI classrooms, can be “have” kids, which is the entire point of what we do,
