Q. I just want to be able to reach my students with this activity and not be boring. A. Our students are so talented, but some of us spend an entire year with them and don’t even notice! Last year I had a student named Juan who did Hip-Hop at a very high level. When […]

Q. Are the sports balls necessary? What about those kids who ski, dance, skateboard, etc. where getting props for those sports into a classroom is difficult? Also, what about the students who do activities that don’t involve athletics at all, like reading? A. The original reason I created Circling with Balls was for those physically

Chicago was wonderful. Craig Sheehy slept at the mini-steering wheel of the monorail above Victoria’s Secret and his Turkish boss yelled at him and then just outright fired him. That same Turkish boss, Lt. Col. Ali Isik, blew up the word chok in Turkish into a big balloon and now I can’t forget it. He

Sometimes I publish comments as articles. I do so because I think that sometimes we miss comments that are important. So this comment-turned-article is from Mark Knowles, Director of the Anderson Language and Technology Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. We have been working with Mark over recent years and will be working

This is a repost from 2013 that fits in with the thread started this morning by Wileen and John about teaching traditionally trained kids: Q. In your new book you mentioned the agony in trying to use TPRS with the kids who have been trained by worksheets and memorization. However, you didn’t mention what you

John concludes sharing his thoughts on how to work with upper level kids we get from traditional classrooms: All my best efforts I’ll save for the first year students, and let the word of mouth filter up. 3rd year students may see a stuffed animal or prop in the classroom and ask: what’s that? I’ll

John continues his response to Wileen’s question about inheriting non-CI trained upper level kids from other classrooms: I really think reading is the bridge between traditional inherited classes and CI. If they are looking at a big readings and doing lots of work with it, students will think they are doing serious work. Conversely, if

Wileen asked this question in a comment earlier this morning: …I am teaching all third-year classes in the fall (well, in two weeks), and they are all coming from more traditional classroom environments. Do you have suggestions in how to test the waters and for how long before resorting to traditional methods?…. I have suggested

Q.  In Circling with Balls, what do you do if there are five kids in the same class who play basketball? A. This has happened to me. I just make each one of them the best player in their region. I can teach geographical expressions that way. Each athlete has a region or a maybe

Since many of us will be starting the new academic year with the Circling with Balls activity, I present some additional information about it in this next series of posts in the form of questions and answers: Q. Should advanced students I am getting next year from a traditional teacher be spoken to in the

I got this question: Hi Ben: I will have 48 8th graders this year that I did some CI instruction with last year but with whom I also used the textbook (I caved!). How would you suggest I approach this returning group as opposed to my fresh batch of 60 7th graders? They liked the

I had mentioned earlier the Educreation website that Chris brought to us this week from Kristen. Here is a sample story in Latin from John: John says about it: …I made this in about 5 minutes, only because the drawings took me so long to make. That’s what a terrible artist I am…. Remember that