Ben Lev has been very active in California this spring, holding parents to standards. He has been very much in people’s faces. I don’t know if the post below has even been published here, bc the queue has been so jammed lately, so I moved it the front of the queue. It picks up that thread that we […]
We were talking briefly here last week about if teachers signed “there is” to start a story. Today, I polled the DPS writing team (when school ends each year we write and refine assessments all day for ten days) and, of the ten teachers there, only two gestured the expression. Annick Chen puts her left hand flat
I recently got this email from a group member: I need to get someone else’s take on what happened to me a few months ago. Some months ago, I was in the middle of a story with my class (Tripp’s Refrigerator story), Charlie Sheen was hungry and looking for some food. He spotted a restaurant
Update on this post, Aug. 12, 2012. The list below has changed and both shorter and longer Word Wall collections can be found on the resources link of this website, click on posters. The text below is actually from months ago. It’s still a good list, but not as good as the ones on the
I got this from one of the those brilliant kids who wears tats and nose rings and suffers so much for it in school by others who judge them, including their grammar oriented teachers: Howdy Mr. Slavic, this is Richard Barnes, I was a student at Summit and I heard you teach a course in
• acheter (to buy) • aider (to help) • aimer (to like) • aller (to go) • apporter (to bring) • apprendre (to learn) • arrêter (to stop) • arriver (to arrive) • attendre (to wait) • avoir (to have) • boire (to drink) • brûler (to burn) • cacher (to hide) • changer (to
I wrote this on gesturing also in 2007 – on May 26, 2007, in fact: In stories, the three words serve the purpose of blasting the class off, so to speak. When you sign and gesture at the beginning of a class, three signs for three structures, you are creating a culture of signing that
I got these questions: Q. What do you think of the idea of teaching students the American Sign Language sign just for the structure words and not for all the other words that students offer when asking a story or otherwise? This way, they would be getting a lot of ASL words that they could
In TPRS, as in any narrative method, we don’t need a lot of tricks. We just need to make ourselves understood, using those skills that work best for us. For me, it is word wall work, point and pause, SLOW, trips into the bizarre, and mega-personalization, and circling. It may be other skills for others.
Drew describes how he scaffolds into writing with his students, then Jen asked a few questions for more details. It’s a good exchange with good details from Drew, so I am reprinting those comments (in edited form) here as a blog post for ease of reference. I am still not clear on how the thesis writing
I got this question in 2007 on the list and wrote the response below. By the way, I went back and searched “gesturing/gestures” here and if you do a search on that or click on the gesturing category you can read about five articles on that topic. I say that bc, among all the changes coming
Ben, I just learned that the Mandarin teacher at my school will not be returning next year. This would be a full time position, full time being four sections, grades 5-8. Classes are small, probably 10-15. The administration and the language department are very open to CI approaches. Teachers have a very generous budget for
