Hello Ben! My name is Dana Schillerstrom. I am currently in my 10th year teaching French, and my FIRST year teaching using the CI method! I attended the IFLT conference in Chattanooga this summer with some colleagues and we were all so excited and inspired. We all purchased a copy of your book and we […]
Last week Diana wrote in a comment here: …assessments are given for only ONE reason…to inform the teacher how to BETTER teach their students…. That just doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t think teachers look upon testing as a way to get information to help them change their instructional practices. I never did that.
Hey Ben and Tina, I wanted to check in with you both about the first two weeks of school. Feel free to share on the blog or not! A lot of this came out of a conversation I had with Tina last week about using the Invisibles with kids in poverty. First of all, I
Steven Ordiano in this report from the field adds still more new information to our deepening understanding of one word images. Thank you so much as well to Kathrin Shechtman in Germany, our artist in France, who first made the connection between OWI and the Invisibles. For those who are deep into the Invisibles, this
The use of the hands to describe the imagined object being created is key, as described in the previous article. Here, Craig West further describes the subtlety of this work with one word images: …I need to learn to let the class create the material that is level appropriate by just asking them the next
We learn to use our hands more and more when we build one word images with our kids. What does that mean? It means that in the same way that a sculptor puts her hands on clay and then steps over to the big lump of clay that she is working with, so also do
The quality of the images created for the Invisibles is the key to the entire thing. We currently have two ways of producing those images: 1. Kids draw them at home. When kids spend hours and hours on them at home, they then naturally generate high levels of interest. Then, when a spirit of competition
I am advocating for a greater focus on readings from stories using our Reading Options, and less on the novels. Reading even simple novels in Level 1, especially, should, in my opinion, not be done. The kids should never have to actually struggle or feel any pressure whatsoever when they read, because struggle means engagement
The second daughter is doing better than her older sister. She’s going to college now but I’m afraid the loans Mo took out will break him. My point in sharing this is that I am amazed how out of touch we are with the incredible amount of suffering U.S. teens are experiencing right now. Families
Mohammed is a friend of mine, the dad of two girls who were at the same middle school I taught in some years ago in Jefferson County, CO. When I go to the King Soopers grocery store near my house where Mo has worked for 20 years I always check in with him. He works
Sophie is a seventh grade student at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India. Last year as a sixth grader she was a part of that active group of young people who brought the Invisibles into the world. Below is an email I got from her today. She is still into the characters we
Esther Viera, a Spanish teacher at Cleveland High School in Portland, OR, shares: Hi everybody! I need to share this. I used One Word Image with the artist and the steps Ben Slavic shared with us when he came to Portland a few weeks ago. There was another group that I didn’t use the One
