Somebody asked me what I have up on my walls. Not much. I once had many posters up and slowly figured out that they don’t work. The extreme nut on too many posters was a teacher at East High who had just about every single inch of his wall covered with verb conjugations of all kinds. Thousands […]

This is the same script but the version below has been slightly modified by James and with a Latin version added below. ENGLISH receives a letter doesn’t care _ receives three gifts on Saint Valentine’s day. _ receives the first gift from _. The first gift is _. A letter is on the gift. In the

Candy Hearts stuck to Spell it! I don’t care Carl receives a Valentine from Miley Cyrus. There is a piece of candy stuck to the card. Bobbie asks Carl what the candy says. Carl says, “I don’t know.” Bobbie says, “Spell it!” So Carl spells it out, “C-A-L-L-M-E” Bobbie says, “Whoa, it says ‘Call Me’!”

We know that in ELA instruction and in too many “CI” classes what they do is pile up the truck full of rocks and naturally most of them spill out on the road. What we  do with CI, on the other hand, is to put just a few rocks in the truck and then they magically multiply by rolling

On the class competition thing we must have releases. Below is the one I use – it may not be perfect but it’s what I use – and I absolutely won’t put up a video even in this private internet space unless I have one for every kid whose face (back of the head is

So we are trying out a new idea again. This one involves class competition (CC) in story creation between students of group members, where one class in one language group in one city challenges another to create a better story than the class in the other city. The videos are only shared between the teachers involved

Robert wrote this as a comment within the general recent thread on output, but I think we should make it into an article for ease of reference. I love the Excursus thing. Is that like a kind of car? When I think of the assessment in terms of Advanced Proficient Basic Below Basic Far Below Basic

Here is the story script, by Sabrina, from the two recent videos by her that we’ve been discussing. I like the little nod to Blaine at the end of the script:   Le coureur sort avec elle/lui – goes out with her/him sortent ensembles – go out together la mate – checks her out/ eyes

I know I just said that I would try to limit the articles this week so we can rest and catch up, but this one article is worth publishing so here it is: VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday that he would resign Feb. 28 — the first pontiff to do so in

This is our Charlotte in Canada, not Germany. It’s a wonderful report from the field: Hi Ben – Yesterday I had a longer phone call from a mom who wanted to know what I had “done” to her daughter.  That would normally send my heart racing a bit, but she quickly continued to tell me

A report from skip from a recent CI workshop in Portland, Maine given by Francis J. Troyan: Hey Ben, I have now been to two 1.5 hour sessions of the “Teaching with Comprehensible Input”. It has been very interesting.  I have these observations: 1.  The first article he gave us by Lee+VanPatten (attached) advocates a

Here is the link to the second part of that class: https://vimeo.com/59204047 My comments: I see that the artist is working on transparencies for later use on the overhead projector. Perfect. It could be done on regular paper if you have a document camera and I like to hide the artist’s work on the back