Angie has a only few days to prepare for an interview coming up on Friday, so make some suggestions. We have had this question before but I’m not sure where it we answered it. Angie maybe you could check here: https://benslavic.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=20465&action=edit&message=1 Hey Ben, I’ve got an interview on Friday and I’ll be teaching a 30 min. class […]

Liam recently shared this sentence with us about talking with Helena Curtain at FLENJ: [Helena] gave a presentation at FLENJ as well, right before mine, in fact. Her presentation (her hallmark thematic unit – which I saw her give several years ago at ACTFL) included several disparaging references to “the TPRS crowd” and she ended,

The great value of having the artist’s work to refer to when doing a retell of a story, vs. not having it, is that when the students are focused on the images created by the artist, they completely forget the words and focus only on the meaning, and are thus certainly acquiring. Working with visual

Cheryl sent this: I saw this and nearly laughed out loud.  It seems that new research indicates that telling kids stories helps them to remember things!! http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/04/why-teachers-should-present-new-material-as-stories/ Cheryl Cowherd

Helena Curtain is dangerous to our profession, if one accepts Krashen. Why is this? In my opinion, Curtain has done nothing more than cobble together a lot of ideas from TPRS and mix them with a lot of last century ideas, which can’t really be done any more than we can mix oil and water.

Here is a survey designed by Drew. If you have one send it and we will add it to this (new) Survey category. Drew explains: I did a great survey with our HooverCam (a camera that grades multiple choice tests on the fly, where each kid generated a random ID number so I wouldn’t know

Meredith is a new PLC member from Washington, D.C. Here is her bio and she needs some responses to an important question raised in the second paragraph below: Hi Ben! I’m a newly-joined member of your PLC and so far I am really learning a LOT. I’m in my first year teaching secondary ed –

This request is from Trisha: Does anyone have any experience with or knowledge of elementary French curricula?  I am interested in anything from first grade to sixth.  I know that there will be differences between what interests a primary student and what interests an upper elementary student.  If you know about something, I’d appreciate the

Hi Ben and all, My wife and I just returned from a wonderful week in Ireland and came back immediately to 4 days of PLU for our local Latin teachers.  Along with a colleague here, we created a 20 hour PLU totally devoted to CI.  Had 9 Latin teachers there who ate this stuff up. 

Dear Ben, I just wanted to give you an update about what is happening over here in France. Fifteen people from 8 countries, the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Spain, England and Scotland, have officially registered for the TPRS Workshop in Agen.  (The lady from Scotland insisted that she is not English.)  Seven or eight

Chrisz (Canada) has come up with an idea that has the potential to blow up the entire grading system into little pieces and bring some sanity into our lives: I have moved Spanish with TPRS to a whole-mark-based-on-final system. Yup, you read that correctly: 100% of the kids’ mark is based on their final exam.

John While doing my grades, I felt the need to bump a student’s overall grade up or down, depending on how well I thought my numbers accurately represented how that student was doing in my class. Trouble is, some of my little angels will  check their numbers to see that they add up. This is