In the interest of teaching my students about the nature of relationships, that there are beginnings and ends to (human) relationships, I will project The Little Prince in French on the board and read it from my heart to them in English in our last three 85 minute classes. They can’t read it in French but […]

Building a sense of community in our classrooms guarantees good physical health and good mental health for us and our children. Teachers burn out when they are not in strong community, because they sense that they are alone in the classrooms, with only a few good memorizers on their side and every other child, to

There are at least two words in French that mean “suddenly”: tout-à-coup soudain I would assume that this might be true in other languages. Here is an idea that Sabrina shares with us to teach those words, and it is a good one that others may want to incorporate into their classes: She states: …in every story

Yesterday when my class got into a chant (call and response) they remembered entire lines from a Matava story we did in the fall. I couldn’t believe it. The community we have built in that one class of sixth graders is deep. It is real community based on real shared fun based primarily on Matava

Hey whatever happened to Kindergarten Day? We forgot about it! Does anyone still do it? We got so busy with the CI that we forgot one of our best CI tools! Oh man, what a thing to forget in our TPRS arsenal!

I actually have asked all of my classes to read the Language of the Trees # 1 post. They know that we have our online community here, and they like to hear what we are talking about from time to time. It makes them feel part of a larger group of people trying to make

Carol has approved a session led by Claire, Tina and I on authentic assessment at the conference. We’re calling it “Assessment in the CI Classroom”. Anyone in on the recent thread or anyone in the PLC is welcome to be there. It would be nice to be able to just sit together and hammer out

Anna Matava has said; …Star of the Week has been my entire curriculum for a group of 7 upper-level students since mid-March. I’ve never seen anything quite like it for building esprit de corps and conversational fluency…. I agree. I think it is kind of new information to many of us. We normally have gone

So I am just following up on that class. Two kids left making me promise that their characters will be in the story next class. We got into a chant. I was doing the Star of the Week thing that I was talking to John about earlier today and they started chanting in response to

So my sixth graders just came in for an hour and a half of fun. Of course, we’ll burn ten minutes at least with SSR. The greatest language gains will happen now during these awesome (read Krashen’s The Power of Reading) first minutes of class. This is the class that read for 41 minutes once.

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