This email from a colleague addresses the simple idea that if we teach numbers by themselves, the kids will learn only the numbers. But, if we teach the actual language, our kids will learn both numbers and the rest of the language as well. Here it is: A second-year kid came in and complained that we […]
If a cow is in the fields and you want it to give milk, you don’t talk to it about the various kinds of grass to eat, analyzing with it the soil that the grass grows in, and you also don’t try to make it create milk before eating any grass. You just let it eat
Backwards design – a term that originally came from discussion with Anne Matava some years ago – is basically “frontloading vocabulary”. It’s the same thing. We pick structures from a reading we want to do with our kids and we do enough PQA around them earlier in the week in the form of stories so
I got this from a former student: Hi Mr. Slavic, Quick question for you. What was that statistic about the number of hours of listening that a person needs before they can do any real output? Was it 1000 hours? I’m pretty sure that that’s what it was but I just wanted to be sure.
I want to turn this recent comment here into a blog so that it will become searchable. (Stephen please note that a search on “classroom discipline” on this site will bring many blog entries from past months and years that may be worth reading on this topic as well.) Stephen wrote: … it’s hard not
I wrote to Stephen this morning about the discipline thing, just as a little pep talk for the day and as a follow up to that comment about from yesterday: Stephen the entire thing is, when a kid is being an ass, to just stop teaching, go into English, and patiently tell them that you
Elissa asked me to post this great question: Hello community of TPRSers- The 7th and 8th grades in my school will be traveling to Costa Rica in May. (Yes, I get to go with them!) And I am feeling stuck trying to figure out how to best prepare them. I’m new to TPRS and have
The tidal waves of change away from grammar and book based instruction are no longer coming, they are here. We in TPRS can take a deep breath. Each state is in a slightly different place on this, of course, but CA and CO are certainly on board with ACTFL – it is a legal thing
Typically, teachers who go to the trouble of making TPRS work for them experience, as a result of that effort, larger class sizes. There is no need to even mention, in this regard, the precipitous drops experienced in traditional classes – it is a fact. In a large suburban Denver high school, 89% of students quit their foreign
Hi Ben! My brother sent this to me. It’s a series of “experiments” by Volkswagen (gotta love the Germans!) showing that fun changes behavior. (That’s the fun theory.) I’m sending the link to the piano episode. They also did this with a trash bin and a recycling bin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw Enjoy! Robert
You know, I was walking around my building Friday and in the hallways I heard some pretty sophisticated versions of the English language. And yet, some of those English language experts were, if you asked their teachers, not any good at languages. Hmmm. The kids I heard spoke English with with total command of not only
PQA is great, but, originally, as I understand it, Blaine used it as a way of etching in, drilling in, the three structures prior to the story so that the story could be more easily understood. I wrote in a recent blog on how that particular process differs from what we have come to know
