Now that my vision is finally clear about this topic of grammar acquisition, I can see that, when the kids translate a reading text and, in doing so, get the image of a movie in their heads, they are learning how the bricks fit together without even knowing anything about the individual bricks except what […]
Showing the kids how the relative pronoun bricks and all those other bricks fit together is a waste of time. It’s all done in English. It’s like making the kids do a picture puzzle. So few even want to complete it. Maybe none of them does, but those who do so, do it out of
If you try to use your ipad to read the blog when you’re on the go, it may not work. When you open the website, it usually doesn’t even provide the “member log in” option, which is the little button on the top right corner. This is because the header (the stuff above the navigation
Nathan Black posted in a comment an idea about shuffling seating that has the potential to be a life saver for many of us this coming year, so I wanted to make it into a separate blog post. It is a simple answer to a big problem. I am definitely going to do it to keep
The CI train needs to stay on the tracks of the three structures. The train goes off the tracks – the CI is largely ineffective – without the three structures present in every sentence uttered in class. The three structures, in fact, drive my entire week of instruction (see Weekly Schedule New (2011). If, during the
My Rule #1 (see benslavic.com/resources/poster/classroom rules) says, “Listen with the intent to understand”. There is another one that says, “Sit up…squared shoulders…clear eyes.” And a third that says “Do your 50%” (explained in a link below). I mean those things. I defend my right to a classroom in which every single child in it does
In the past century, teachers would take a batch of bricks, grammar points arranged in chapters in books, and, laboriously, each day, boldly, inflict a kind of analytical pain session on the kids about the nature of that particular brick. They thought that they were building a grammar foundation for the kids to base their eventual
We all suck at this. I just wanted to say that. Now, that said, can we just accept that we may be clumsy with this radically different method than the one that preceded it? Can we just accept our limited level of mastery of the method and, by trying every day, get better through those micro-efforts
I was asked in St. Louis for a list of jobs my kids do in class. I can never remember them all, but here is a partial list with about 18 jobs listed – many of the ones below are described in either TPRS in a Year! or PQA in a Wink!. Those jobs marked with an asterisk
I got this from John: Ben, I was hoping we could develop and/or refine previous discussions about arming ourselves with a description of the underlying theory about comprehensible and even compelling input for our colleagues, administrators and parents. With Krashen and CI, I feel like I am much better able to describe what we’re NOT doing
August is just hours away so don’t forget that we have the Beginning the Year and Starting the Year categories with stuff about that. One thing to add is, in my view, it is not a good thing to have a seating chart from the first day. I wait and check things out. I go alphabetical
