Assessment instruments like common assessments and formative tests that require memorization destroy our students’ sense of self-confidence in the language. Who says that they have to learn it by a certain date, all at the same time? Some kids who process our instruction fast will do well on the test, some who process more slowly […]
Not too many teachers have tried to use the Ultimate CI™ approach (UCI™) with very small children. I guess the assumption is that it’s a middle and high school thing. But a member of my current Book 2 UCI training group asked the other members of the group if anyone is using the StarChart™ in
What concerns me about those little chapter books put out by Ray and Gaab et al is that they are being used too early in a child’s language career. Huge amounts of auditory input should precede reading input, and the CI world, in rather cavalier fashion, currently dives into the novels way too early in
Of the three books attached here in a post a few days ago – free only to patrons – the Ultimate CI Books (1 and 2, with Book 3 due out sometime in 2022) actually took the past six years to write. Books 1 and 2 originally appeared in 2016 as one big monster book
This post is for people doing UCI: Stop getting freaked out by thinking how hard it is to create stories using comprehensible input. Just do this: As you make the tableau (QL2 – 4), DRAW INFORMATION FROM WHAT YOU ESTABLISHED WHEN BUILDING THE TABLEAU to make the story. Smack dab in the middle of those
This is a post from 2017 that I happened across this morning. The words are even more true than they were then: Reflections on a Career I was sitting at my desk at the end of another long day in the trenches, thinking back, just thinking about the almost four decades and roughly 35,000 classes
This post is for people using the StarChart™: To make a story “pop” in the minds’ eyes of the students, you need only three things: a character that your students can identify with (and nothing is more near to a student’s heart than a character created by the class (OWI) or by an individual student
When we teach according to the standard of Communication and the research that says that Comprehensible Input is the way human beings acquire languages, we open up for ourselves in the act of teaching each day a wide expanse of possibilities. What possibilities? Happy ones. If something occurs during our instruction that is funny, we
When children come to us to learn the languages that we teach them, they come to us in trust. But we do not always honor that trust. We do that unintentionally of course – but the result is the same. Why is this? It is because of the way we think about curriculum. We think
Very often we have kids who only speak the language plopped down into our classrooms and we don’t know what to do with them and it’s a pain for us to deal with. I have already addressed how useful the Word Chunk Team Activity is in occupying these students. But we can’t use WCTA very
Sublingual Output is a term I made up because I don’t know the proper research term. It’s when the kids seem to be repeating stuff you say to themselves but you can barely see their lips move. the term conveys the idea and that’s all I care about. Anyway, in those trainings, when you are
