This is from Jim on planning our CI lessons: I do a lot of my backward planning from songs. Of course, this isn’t always the most efficient form of planning (yet), because songs contain an array of high frequency structures and words that we may not be able to get nicely packaged in the form […]
Liz Hughes is doing a great job down there in Columbia, SC teaching her graduate course on TPRS for the group of Irmo teachers under the leadership of Michel Baker, whose blog by the way is a good one to visit (find link on this blog). I think the homework the workshop attendees got this
I got a question about TPRS asking where the number of 75 repetitions per structure may have come from. Here is an answer that may or may not be accurate: Carol Gaab has said that she has a goal of 75 repetitions for simple structures and up to 150 for more complex structures. Wow. If
It is a good time for rogue bloggers to send me emails for the summer for me to blog here: benslavic@yahoo.com We had the guest blogger program that started in March but we inundated the blog with too much stuff and it became almost unreadable. So folks like Robert, Grant, Matthew, and those Pleaides members,
Dear Ben, I’m wondering what everyone else in this group is doing about grades. Our district now has Zangle, which has a serious disadvantage in that whatever way you set it up at the beginning of the year is the way it will stay all year. No tweaking, unless you want it to affect the
Teachers who work hard don’t necessarily reach their kids. That may be true in other lines of work, but this language game is not about working hard. If it were, parents who aggressively teach their small children language would have more fluent kids later on, but this is not true. It’s just the opposite. Everybody
There is a cool funtion on the blog calendar here – to the right – that I just discovered. If you are looking for a recent blog all you have to do is put the cursor on the day you think it may have been posted and a little square will come up listing the blogs for that
Jody sent this for us a few days ago: Warren Ediger, creator of the website, Successful English, wrote an interesting article this week about “How do I know if my language ability is improving?”. I am very interested in this topic and wrote to him to ask if I might use his ideas to help
How do I know I'm Getting Better at ________ (fill in the language)? Read More »
Michele has a few questions in this larger email to me. I defer to my colleagues on the question about TPR: I know that Ben is always revisiting Susie. I have just watched all of the Susie videos in the three-video set. Can you believe that, while my school paid for those, I hadn’t had
K has updated us on her lunchtime French crowd, which is meeting through the summer: Hello Mr. Slavic: I wanted to update you on the first summer lunch group meeting. It went very well. I’m pretty sure that my parents are crazy since they allowed 25 teenagers to be in their house for a very
This just in from Robert Harrell: Are we fearful of fun? I thought all of you would be interested in this article. It originally appeared in the Washington Post and deals with the necessity of fun in order to learn. Robert http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/learning/why-fun-matters-in-education.html My guest is Sean Slade, director of Healthy School Communities, a program of
Maybe we became teachers because we like to be in control. But there is a problem with that. Real conversation between people, the good stuff, cannot be controlled. In a good discussion, no one voice dominates. Good talk is a dance among equals. That is where the 50% rule applies. I think that that 50% rule is
