I thought that Chris’ Wants To Be script would be a huge success, and he thought so too, but it wasn’t. Let’s try to open up a thread about this, if we can. We can try to figure out what happened. It can be a very valuable learning experience. Here is Chris’ wonderfully honest follow […]

This is a significant post from Chris in that he attacks full on the concept of starting stories as a beginner. What is important is that the story he wrote came from his own knowledge of his class, is based on what vocabulary they knew, what their own interests as a class were, etc. It’s

I was just thinking about how I have these three things I really want to do with the kids today: 1. Finish our learning styles inventories, which have nothing to do with French but are really getting us to know each other. Plus, it’s so much fun. It’s a guessing game too. 2. I just

In the same way that we can create Card Stories from the Circling with Balls cards, we can also create Reading Stories from any little readings that we may have lying around in our classrooms. Instead of using the cards, we use these readings. The concept is the same – we get something and create

Card Stories are very simple stories based on the Circling with Balls activity cards that some of us did to start the year. Card stories represent an intermediate zone of CI instruction that is more complex than the simple sentences that characterize the PQA done with the cards, yet is much simpler than full blown stories.

Skip Crosby provides us with some numbers from Maine about how language teachers basically taught themselves out of jobs because they couldn’t grab and hold kids’ interests. Here is what he wrote: …when our school opened in 1999 we offered Latin, ASL, French and Spanish. We now only offer Spanish. At one point there were 9 teachers

This bio is from Dirk. It contains some radical thoughts, even for us. I agree fully with every single point he makes. Dirk is a freestyle expert. Read why: I just had a chance to go through the last month or of the blog entries. I apologize for not sending a bio sooner and not

If you send me an email to be published as a blog entry, it generally gets published within a few days, but just fyi the queue is really jammed up right now. If you are looking for something to appear that you sent in the last few weeks, it will eventually get there, so please

I was talking to Grant tonight and we thought it rather odd that people perhaps don’t fully realize that these are our jobs at stake and that, to that effect, two things are true: 1. WL enrollments increase vastly when comprehensible input is the medium used for instruction. Enrollments go up significantly. Programs are saved from

Chris, in a blog comment to https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/09/12/model-what-you-want-from-them/, questioned the value of bellringer activities, suggesting that kids seem to be annoyed by them and looking for possible options. Robert Harrell responded (made into a blog post here for ease of reference: Chris, I have tried to do bell work. A few years ago I had something

I am doing a site redesign and want to highlight some of the better blog posts here. If you have a blog entry that has been really useful to you, please send its link to me by private email at benslavic@yahoo.com. I appreciate it. Ben

I got this question and don’t know the answer. Anyone? – Is there any way I can have the blog RSS feed to my Google Reader?