After last week’s report from Deena I asked her to contribute with regular, possibly weekly, reports. I feel that other people can benefit greatly from these reports from Deena. Here is her second report: Good morning Ben, I started the week really concentrating on SLOW…I am thinking that I didn’t do that great of a job…lots […]

Ben, I’m on a prep now, but I cannot contain myself. Tears are welling up in my eyes. This is my first year using TPRS and CI, and I dived into Circling with Balls with all my 7th and 8th graders. They are COMPLETELY into it. I’ve shocked them AND myself by staying in Spanish

My grade book is just a little place to drop a few numbers in from time to time. The numbers describe the easy little quizzes we take at the end of class sometimes and some of the other easy activities that kids enjoy doing in class. I also put in numbers to rate the kids’

Our PLC member Laura Avila has done something remarkable. She teaches in Maine in the same building with Anne Matava, who filed this report: My colleague Laura told me today that a former student of hers just placed into the highest Spanish class (500-level) as a freshman at the university.  Laura works harder than anyone

This is a most welcome report from Angie. Those who remember the year she went through last year will want to read this. Here is a link to that other article if you want to read it first: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/10/25/angie-dodd/ The work Angie is doing now is not a high status job. But it is true work and so

James shares his mission statement for this year and it consists of just one word: No amount of student unrest or pride, no amount of pressure from administrators, schedules, or parents, and no amount of misdirected, self-serving personal goals will make me go even a bit faster than all my students can understand.

Chris Stoltz reports: Hi Ben – There are Western Canada workshops coming up, useful also for US people in Northern Idaho, Montana and Washington states: The BC Association of Teachers of Modern Languages (BCATML) conference is here (Vancouver) and will be open for registration in a few weeks.  There will be an Intro to TPRS

I have a question for those using jGR. It’s really just a reflection question because each of us do this work differently. Here it is: Can cCWB obviate the need to use jGR? For me, when I  circle “Juan dances” for the entire class period, always using the verb in every single thing I say, I find that

I’m going to repost this every few weeks or whenever I think about it for obvious reasons: As we know, last week our group member Trisha Schutzius (Fort Collins, CO) rounded up all the information in the Robert Harrell Scope and Sequence articles and put them into one document that she called rSS/Sum. This summary and

Yesterday our new group member Deena sent in this report. I jumped it up in the queue because it is more than cool: Hey Ben! Cannot contain myself!  I had my first day of the real deal today…I reviewed the RULES that I introduced yesterday and started in with a few structures in Spanish…Hay (there

This is the last in the series of posts about the Georgia Foreign Language tenets. Gary Null has been doing his thing promoting natural and wholistic ways of healing the body for about thirty years now. All through the years there was a feeling in Gary’s message, and in the country as a whole, that