Lance has sent over TWENTY videos for us to watch. As with Alisa’s video and any and all video we can get to talking about here (there are many on the hard link above) this is a learning opportunity. It could be the equivalent experience of terms of learning gains about CI to an entire summer conference, […]

jGR is a big part of many of our classroom management plans. Here we get an update from Diane Neubauer on how DPS’ Annick Chen, one of the four who helped develop it, has done some tinkering with it in her Chinese and French classes: Hi Ben, I got to meet with Diana & Annick

Hey Ben – Here’s my 1st attempt at sharing my classroom T/CI practice via video demo. I want to both up my game and contribute/give back to the professionals from whom I’ve learned so much. Notes: These are beginner 1st graders who’ve had 3×30 or 90 minutes/week Spanish instruction since October. We got off to

This long but invaluable text from the Big CI Book was originally a series of Forum posts from a year or so ago by Catharina on ways to incorporate CI into the elementary classroom: Appendix I – Thoughts on Elementary TPRS Instruction Catharina Greenberg, an expert on elementary TPRS instruction, shares ideas that are directed

John listed four things as his CI power activities: CWB vPQA Movie Talks Story-Asking Mine are: SSR Stories Grammar (as a throw-them-a-bone-activity so people stay off my butt) WCTG Textivate (as a the-teacher-uses-technology activity) Free Writes Dictee The Class Poem I just don’t have time for anything else! If others want to share it might

The current thread here about using interview type activities to get more output from students vs. the traditional less output centered classes that we have when we use stories has been addressed by Nathaniel in a tour de force comment this morning that pretty much solves the problem for me, enabling me to focus less

The free write numbers of my foundational kids dropped noticeably in one class today. What is shocking is that the scores went down just at the time I stopped doing stories – the last free write was in November. Maybe it’s not such a shock. Maybe all this talk of relaxing needs to shift to

This poem can be used to generate some very high quality CI in French classes at any level. Just project it on the screen, start reading it and discussing it (R and D) and you will see that at some point you have a story going. At that point just bring up the ant and

Why teach kids when you can avoid it? Why let actual teaching get in the way of a good assignment? The photo below reveals so much about what we are up against in our buildings… https://classroom.google.com/u/0/welcome

Continuing with my general spring plan (not that it’s all I’ll do, of course) for the next five months of this academic year, here is what I plan to do after the SSR (Part A) part has been completed, about 30 minutes or so into class. None of it is new, really: Second section of

So here is my plan for the spring. As stated, its first priority is my own mental balance and not the delivery of as much CI into my classroom as possible, which I see now was a serious mistake that I have made with TPRS for the past fifteen years, because it caused me to

My new instructional plan for the second semester is based on an idea that, in my view, soars in importance far above any other in CI instruction, that students must never be given the opportunity to behave in a CI classroom in a rude or antisocial way. In the past, in my fervor to get