I’m behind on Teacher of the Month but I’ll get caught up. This one is for March and is a no-brainer: Throughout the month of March and throughout the year, we have benefitted from the intellectual prowess and expertise – it’s the right word – of Eric Herman. He has sent us videos, shared all […]

When Mozart was a kid, his young mind was bathed in music – it is all he heard around him.  His dad didn’t say, “Hey, Wolfgang, this is an eighth note, and this is a half rest. We’ll do some cool music theory tomorrow morning. And check out this treble clef over here. I bet you’d

I just got this from Jim: http://www.classtools.net/qwikslides/10_U3X3gH Ben, here is one of those Qwikslides stories that you may want to share with PLC members. It’s about 5 de Mayo. I did it kind of spur of the moment, haven’t read it yet with students all the way through, so there may be errors or inaccuracies

We can’t go through the afternoon and evening as discussed in the last post on iFLT, because the building we are in, North High School, won’t allow us to stay that long. So those of us planning to do the War Room will have to do the sessions Carol has given us time for (we

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sean’s position there in Chicago, and the way he kind of does double duty with his urban students. He has to provide the instructional piece, of course, but also seems (from his comments here) to be very aware of the struggles (he mentioned the word depression in a recent

Diana shared recently here that we in DPS are considering dropping the speaking part of our yearly assessments. That is a good thing. Speech output just happens. It can’t be taught because it happens as a result of ultra-sophisticated neural processes that occur in the deeper mind and not because of any conscious thinking we

Some articles from five years ago that give insight into how we were looking at the possibilities of lots of reading back then: https://benslavic.com/blog/?s=zipless+tprs

So to review the SOA process, what we can do is: 1. Start with some kind of interesting or even compelling image. Just one. Eric’s suggestion of having the students bring in the pictures, especially if the students themselves were in the pictures, is a good one when choosing images. The main thing is that

Again, I prefer SOA over stories because it is simpler and easier to stay in bounds. Whenever I did a story, and I have done 14 years worth of them, I never knew quite what was going on. Working from an image locks things down a bit more. The downside to SOA is that it

I think that people who are frustrated with doing stories will benefit from this twist on the Three Steps of TPRS, because it is easier to do than stories. It’s a cobbling together of ideas we have been discussing here over the past months, a kind of fusion of ideas, using Look and Discuss –

What if we had something more concrete to work with than stories? Is there a way to make asking a story more simple? Story Option, described below, is a way to make the Three Steps of TPRS come to life in a different and more potentially powerful way than stories, because it is simpler. Before

Lake Forest Country Day School in Chicago is seeking a Grade 4-8 Mandarin Chinese teacher for the 2014-15 school year. LFCDS is seeking an innovative teacher with experience teaching American children and native or near-native Mandarin language ability. The successful candidate will build on LFCDS’ successful, seven-year-old Chinese program built on Comprehensible Input-based teaching. LFCDS