Okay. Saturday morning now, and I have my first cup of coffee. Here’s the story a little more filled out. A couple of changes took place in our district this past year. You should know that Gwinnett County Public Schools is the largest school system in GA and compares size wise with the LA School […]
Here is Panel 6: Present vocabulary in chunks and in context rather than as isolated words or lists. In TPRS/CI we chunk words in context. It’s awesome. It is the right way to go. Totally agree with this one. 2 and 4.
As I mentioned in the last post, I weigh jGR at 65% of the grade. But how frequently do I assess using jGR? A teacher asked me this question in an email: Q. In your new book you mentioned using jGR for a daily assessment. Do you make that assessment every day for every kid?
I weigh Quick Quizzes at 65% of the overall grade and jGR at 35% – those numbers work for me. I would like to share in this post how often I enter grades on Quick Quizzes: My take is to do as many as I can. Two per week minimum. But I see the wisdom of
Panel 5 says: Provide learners with meaningful concrete experiences, making extensive use of visuals, props, realia, and hands-on activities. I am kind of split on this one, but I am going to have to disagree. This implies that the teacher is this kind of Professor Magic with a deep bag of interesting tricks and activities (realia)
I want my classes to be about discovering things together with my students. I want to make things up with them. I want us to learn together how to have fun while we learn French. I believe that my students need people like me to help them get more curious, and less jaded, about school.
Here’s panel 4 of that Georgia document: Provide learners with a rich target language environment that includes extended listening opportunities such as narration, descriptions, and explanations. Finally – this is one I agree with. This is exactly what TPRS does – we extend listening opportunities up the wazoo; we narrate stories and – in PQA
Laura Censi sent this image, taken at the end of class. Sorry I can’t figure out how to make the image smaller. Here is what she asked: Hi Ben, This is my first year doing TPRS and I’ve got three Spanish I classes. I wanted to show you how much I have on the board. I
I got this from Lori – there are two good discussion points in it, one about designing a curriculum from target structures (the only way I would ever “design” a curriculum and that with reluctance) and another about the P word – projects. Please throw some ideas at Lori. If she comes up with a
Somebody once commented to me about the combined intellect we have on this blog and I heartily concur. There’s Robert doing his 50% and the rest of us doing our half so Robert doesn’t have to do it all. And some of us, like Sabrina right now who is moving from Chicago to join our
Let’s take a look at panel 3: Help learners clarify meaning and express understanding without translation. If they mean no translation, as per the last blog entry on this site, then this is just another impractical idea. Who wrote this? Any teacher who has actually spent time in a classroom knows that this is impossible to achieve in
The Georgia FL Tenets as published in 2009 were in a kind of slide show or power point format. Here is one of the first panels from that Georgia document about what they want their foreign language teachers to be doing in Georgia classrooms: AVOID using translation as a tool for clarifying meaning. This is
