I wrote this to John and the few others who might be experiencing May stress: John I have found solace these last pew weeks in Star of the Week. No planning. I don’t even sit a kid in a chair. I just give the class a sheet with every kid’s name on it with a bunch […]

I can’t believe we’ve done this to ourselves. I can’t believe we have taken such a simple thing as telling a story and turned it into a military exercise. We have made it so complicated! In the “Boats and Trains” articles here, I hope to have made the case for a return to simplicity, to

Amanda Baumann is our elementary French instructor here at the American Embassy School and very much aware of group dynamics in a classroom. She is the one who told me about David Kohl’s work The Open Classroom, a revolutionary book that describes everything I am trying to do in my TPRS classroom written way back

This rubrics/assessment thread is like trying to stop a freight train but I do feel honestly that we need a break from it as discussed here yesterday. Let me share what I am comprehending so far: Jen:  “More fine-tuned descriptors I guess would show a more accurate picture of where the child is, but is that

I just picked up a nice little detail about reading stories. As you prepare the reading from the story, make deliberate mistakes, three or four per paragraph. Tell the kids, “There are three mistakes in the first paragraph.” They start looking for them. When someone finds one, fix it. Each time they find one, fix

http://www.npr.org/2016/05/10/477449865/in-polluted-new-delhi-triathlete-weighs-costs-of-exercising-outside?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=morningedition&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160510

Instead of being cooped up in the train, staring at each other all day, which is very much what happens to CI teachers who are following lesson plans in their classrooms, when we do targetless CI we are free to run around the boat, playing hide and seek, skipping the quizzes, playing hooky, having fun.

In order to fully integrate into my psyche the changes we have been talking about this year, and in order to be able to integrate the changes that we are going to make next year, if this year is any indicator, I am calling for this break on the PLC. It is because our hearts are

As we all wind up our individual years, with so little time to do much more than compile grades, fill out end of year reports, and have inane conversations with posers who can’t figure out why we teach this way, etc. we should probably thing about taking a long summertime break. Needless to say with

Alisa sent this nice and simple rubric:

It’s all about fear. Either we raise the freak flag on our boats as each story chugs out of the CI harbors each day, or we don’t. If we want the good stuff, we – and that includes new people – will start out our stories without targets. That’s what Blaine does and explains why

The link below – I republish it here like once a month as a reminder – holds one of the master keys, in my opinion, to TPRS. No joke. I see what is expressed in the article as connected to the new thread about the grove of trees, how we cannot learn a language unless