Clarice remember that you can always immediately bail out to a dictation. Yes – CI instruction comes with an inflatable life raft. Just stop what you are doing – PQA , story, reading class, whatever – and do a dictee on whatever it was you were working on. No more drowning feeling! And the kids […]

 Those drowning moments remind me of Dylan Thomas. I believe the name of the poem is “Nullus”. The poet talks about moments in life that are as “ugly and black as death itself” but then goes on to say that those are the moments in which “the creative changes take place. So it can be

Just rambling on about those drowning moments. It’s like just letting the snow plow keep on plowing in spite of the big drifts it occasionally has to plow up against. It may slow down a little but it just keeps on plowing. The snow – the kids – know next to nothing of the extra

Chunk Dictation works best at the end of the year when the kids have had lots of comprehensible input. It obviously can’t work in the beginning months of study since output in the form of writing can only follow massive amounts of input (listening and reading) as per Krashen. How does Chunk Dictation work? On

Clarice this is a way too lengthy post but I publish it here anyway. Maybe someone will reverse daylight savings and you will have time to read it. Staying in the Moment is my favorite skill in PQA and stories. It describes what happens not in PQA but in a story, described below, but it is

Clarice the thoughts here about PQA are just my opinions. I hope they help even a little. They are those water wings I talked about. – it is a good decision to videotape; it’s painful but you will see things. – the more you PQA the more it shifts from your brain into your body

Sometimes, teachers feel that they fail at comprehensible input methods. That they simply can’t get on the CI train. Blaine and Susie and Jason can run that fast but we can’t, is the feeling. But look around. Schools now are on the verge of collapse. Kids have been trained in the current system to cheat almost

Here is a Jim Tripp story if you need something for tomorrow. For those of you unfamilar with Jim’s story format, he likes to suggest optional target structures – so there is a simple version and then one with a few optional structures, the ones in brackets: Bad Smells  [rooms of a house] [levels of a house] smells bad goes up/down

I just got this from Martha Nojima in Japan: In the last year TPRS Japan has become a community. We have several members in Tokyo and then most members are south of Tokyo. We have three members in the north. All three of them read the blog. Jack Taylor runs the TPRS forums. He is

My visit to George Washington yesterday was so much fun. The entire department of five young teachers all agree that Krashen is the best way to go for their kids. Because of this, and perhaps because of the youth of these teachers (they average under 30 as I said here elsewhere), I spent my day

Now, to push the rebar/concrete image further, but hopefully not too far, please note something else. If we add too many new rocks/words to the concrete/story on Tuesday, it then overloads the rebar and the concrete fails – the story doesn’t work – even if we got over 120 structures on each structure on Monday. We

This is the first in a short series of blog posts about PQA: A rebar (short for reinforcing bar) is a steel bar used in reinforced concrete structures to hold the concrete together. In that way, three rebar rods in a piece of concrete would be like the three structures we use to hold stories together. Now,