Kristen sent this upon my request and thank you Kristen: Hi Ben, The app I have been using more and more of this year is called Educreations. On a storytelling day, I hand my iPad to the kid who wants to have the artist job. He or she draws on the iPad as the class […]

Another group member in Calgary: Hi, Ben – My name is Jacqueline Ford. I am a French teacher to grades 5 – 9 in Calgary, AB, Canada. I am the sole second language teacher in my school and I am grateful to have the support of your PLC as even in my extremely large school

John send an article posted by Bob Patrick over on the Latin Best Practices site yesterday. Thank you John. Here is Bob’s post: When we spend our time talking about Latin, students learn about Latin. When we spend our time speaking in Latin, students learn Latin. When we spend our class time talking about Latin,

This is a bio from Eric Herman. Watch some of the videos. Amazing from only a second year teacher! Hi Ben – I am a Spanish teacher, grades 3-8, in Edgartown, MA. I am in my second year of teaching, but thanks to my obsessive study of the second language acquisition research and of the

We have a set of questions here that need our attention and responses: Ben, This is year 2 (really semester 2) of my Spanish 1 TCI odyssey and I’m feeling some serious self-doubt. I am curious if, when you were getting started, you felt overwhelmed, a bit lost, maybe a bit random in terms of

I’ve been thinking about the administrator pressures that we endure each day. I consider them extremely detrimental to our mental health and I feel strongly that they are unnecessary, because administrators don’t understand how people acquire languages – they think it is an academic subject but it is a human one. So I updated this

A repost from last spring, updated: We have talked about what possible “forms” an academic year could take doing TPRS/CI. There are links on that topic here: https://benslavic.com/blog/category/yearly-planning/ There is a general plan that I have been gravitating toward. 1) I do about two months of the stuff described here to start the year, the

Chris Stoltz’ article is getting continued attention. This is from Nathaniel Hardt in Massachusetts: Hi Ben, I tried to get to where your commendation was to Chris’ article but couldn’t remember where it was. [ed. note: it is here: http://www.bctf.ca/TeacherNewsmagSept2013/ (p. 16)] I shared the link with other FL teachers in my district.  At least

Here is a bio from Susan: Salut Ben! I am a French teacher at Junction City High School in Kansas. I’m one of those French teachers who is also the French Department. I attended a Blaine Ray Conference, probably 5 years ago in Denver, and decided to make the leap of faith. I told myself

Here is Jessica’s bio: I teach Latin at Guilford High School in Connecticut. I first encountered CI in the form of a TPRS demo using an African language at a conference and was blown away because I felt for the first time that I could, in the right circumstances, learn to understand a foreign language

Anne Matava has recently completed ten scripts for Houdini. Here is what she says about them: Ben – Three or four of these are some of the best scripts I’ve ever used, and the rest are solidly serviceable. The first one, the one about the rules of the house, the mother who is too busy

We are starting to get different versions of jGR, each tailored to the individual needs of the teacher. That is a good thing, as we are all individual teaching artists. Here is one from Chris Roberts, who first explains: Ben, I’m attaching my jGR revision that seems to be working for me. Could you take