The beginning of the year information on the resources link of this site (click on workshop handouts) is changing. My concept of how to best start a year to get French 1 kids ready for stories and culture study via comprehensible input, especially, is now different. How?   The first change has already been discussed […]

 Today I made a connection between stirring pancake batter and circling. Here it is:   When we stir the batter, the lumps go away and the batter is smooth. That is just what we want to do with our repetitive questions when we circle. We want to just keep making circles with the wisk in

Here in Colorado many houses sit on clay foundations and, over the years, lose their stability. Houses built on clay won’t hold up over time out here. The same thing occurs when a child’s second language foundation is made of clay. The pedagogical discussion around this point is simple – what constitutes clay? What is the best

Today on Democracy Now I heard the noted Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef’s speak in an interview with Amy Goodman. He said: “We have reached a point in our evolution in which we know a lot [but] understand very little. Never in human history has there been such an accumulation of knowledge like in the last

Below is the flyer information from Skip providing the information about my upcoming visit to Maine: The World Language Department at Poland Regional High School will host Ben Slavic, author of TPRS in a Year! and PQA in a Wink! on October 7 & 8, 2010 in Lewiston. This second workship will address ways to reach

I used to think that one of the reasons TPRS was so difficult for me was that I didn’t have the energy for it. It just seemed to require so much effort to get a story going. Surely there must be an easier way to teach! Now I realize that it wasn’t about requiring a

The opening of a story – that PQA – can really drag things into too many details. Especially when I first started doing stories, I remember that I would get caught up in adding too many cute details. It’s just so much fun and we are having success, so we keep adding details until half the class

Anne Matava sent this today: Don’t Drink the Water was ate drank Justin was in Cuba.  His friends had said to him (or warned him),  “Don’t drink the water!  Don’t eat the roadkill!”  But Justin was in Cuba, so of course he drank the water and ate the roadkill.  He turned into a coconut. Then

When we start a meal of CI in our classrooms, we don’t need to clutter our students’ plates with too much food. We only need to offer them three basic foods – steak, fries, and peas. Steak. What is that in our comprehensible input classroom? That’s easy. It’s the main thing, the thing that our kids absolutely

This is anecdotal, with no hard data, but still is worth a short blog entry: In the past three or four years, We in Denver Public Schools have been pushing to allow with new standards and proficiencies at the national (ACTFL) and state (Colorado State Standards as revised in December of 2009). To our knowledge,

In the old foreign language classroom, the dynamic was very different. The teacher would only approve of the student if they did what they were supposed to do. The message was, “I will approve of you if you do what I want you to do.” But if we release the kid to be fully in

We wouldn’t want to fly a plane in a thunderstorm. In the same way, conditions have to be right for us to do intuitive comprehensible input (thin slicing) in our classrooms. How to get the right conditions to thin slice? If we are comfortable with the kids and the CI process (if we are going