What are the Five Finger Rules? 1. No notetaking 2. Nothing on the desk 3. No repeating after me in any language 4. Signal me when you don’t understand 5. Everything I say is interesting, so if you understand, then let me know So, if a child is in anyway breaking one of the rules, […]

Krashen’s point that too much testing is a bunch of hooey and that poverty is the real problem vs. Duncan’s reckless positioning of the big governement testing guns leaves us with so much smoke that we can barely see our way through a lesson plan. But there is a pathway through the forest of Krashen

…by encouraging learners to focus on the words, the teacher activates their left hemispheres and deactivates their right ones. This is the most unfortunate, because the right hemisphere learns 1,600 times faster than the left one…. …so, does the very process of teaching language work against the learners learning the language? The answer is “yes”,

This article that Jim sent today needs to be a separate blog post: The National Standards Discussion: A Weapon of Mass Distraction Stephen Krashen We are again invited to give our opinions about the content of national standards (http://www.parcconline.org/parcc-content-frameworks). We are not invited to discuss whether we need national standards and their spawn, national tests. For those who

If we agree with Krashen that comprehensible input is all about teaching so that we allow our students to learn the language we teach them unconsciously, that is, without any conscious control of what sticks in their minds (that being a hugely complex process that cannot be accomplished merely by the incapable conscious mind) then we need to

Dr. Krashen wrote this: What School is All About Sent to the Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2011 In addition to influencing the medical literature (LA Times, July 16), J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter has a great deal to say about current educational policy. In “Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix” (2007), villain Dolores Umbridge

Anne Matava wrote this, which ties into the discussion we are having right now with Lori: Is anyone working in a school that is moving towards a standards-based model?  My school is, and I am having difficulty reconciling the new demands with what we know to be true about language acquisition.  Up until this point

I got this from a blog member: I have a question about your rules, for the “Do your 50%” rule, how do you explain that to students when you explain your rules?  I”ve read some posts you wrote about that rule but I’m still shaky on understanding it completely. My response: I tell the kids

…those of us who give a “homework grade” are really assessing if a child has done work, rather than if the child has actually learned anything. Realistically, does the fact that they did the work (or copied it) mean that they have learned anything…?

Next week I plan to test out the potential of a new plan to have kids counting each PQA target in the Circling with Balls cards (“Larry is a mechanic”) in the same way that kids count structures in PQA sessions building up to stories. I may even have a kid time me and point

I lost my yellow card with the One Word Image (OWI) information at NTPRS. If anyone maybe got it mixed up in their stuff, please send me the cool new information we added to it. I want to do that new stuff this year, but the only new prompt I can remember from the list

I got this yesterday from a blog member: I’m going into my 2nd year teaching, but it almost feels like my first because last year was very traditional and textbook based but this year I am jumping into TPRS after going to a couple of workshops and reading like a maniac about TPRS.  School starts