As mentioned here a week ago, there is a new arrangement with the story artist. Perhaps it’s the iPad with so many bells and whistles  that causes the artist to disappear into the iPad and thus miss valuable input. So I changed that job so that the artist does the drawing at home, perhaps sketching a […]

Here is the draft from Robert: In a recent discussion with other teachers, one of the participants expressed the following opinion in opposing Teaching with Comprehensible Input: “If you teach like a baby learns its first language, your students won’t say their first word for two-and-a-half to three years.” While the statement indicates a number

Hi Everyone, Last Thursday I was at a District World Languages Department Chair meeting. The TOSA (Teacher on Special Assignment) opened a discussion about language acquisition. During the discussion, classroom practice came up. One of the other department chairs, who is quite traditional in his approach, talked about having students memorize lists of words so

Diane mentioned Bryce’s Dual Line Reading Entry form. It is to be used with oppositionally defiant kids (or anyone else) whom we have separated out from the class in another classroom because they can’t behave. I’m sure that no one in our PLC allows those rare truly oppositionally defiant kids the privilege of staying in

I’m reposting this because the issue of blurting just came up as a thread. I have to say that this plan is better than any I have ever used to control blurting. Today it worked perfectly. No blurting. Even the worst blurter, a funny 6th grader with a fast mind and a great heart, came up

Here’s an idea from Eric someone may like to try out: Hey Ben: Quick strategy I’m trying this year and having success with thus far: Kids sit in chairs in a semi-circle with a few chairs behind the semi-circle. If a kid blurts out L1 or L2, he/she is asked to move to the back

From Eric: Check out Jim Trelease’s image: https://app.box.com/s/42shyfan0x5p754wsr71/1/1189482717/14395317372/1

Running dictation is such a good way to give kids a break from lots of input. Linda did a running dictation class today and it was during my planning period so I was able to observe. Linda asked the students to self-reflect on the activity and here are some of their thoughts: “This exercise was

Eric is testing a sequence of high frequency verbs. Here is the link: https://benslavic.com/blog/a-good-ideateaching-hf-verbs/ I have been using this. It is really good. I just take the sheet and hold it in my hand as a story script. You may want to try this one! Thanks Eric!

I was just talking with Linda Li and she told me that ten years ago in China she tried a yoga class, her first ever, and it was at the wrong level. She said that that bad experience has never left her. She feels that it prevented her from trying yoga again. We both agreed

Steven Ordiano in Fresno CA has given us some really great free write materials. One is a form for free writes and the other is an assessment instrument that resembles OWATS: FluencyWrite FluencyWriteAnalysis  

I don’t even know if this one is even listed in our list of bail out moves. It’s really simple. Whenever we need to bail out (when the CI is sluggish and we feel kind of scared that we don’t know what we are doing, which is fairly common for all of this in this