When you are teaching a class using comprehensible input, new words or word chunks will naturally pop into your mind. The general rule of thumb is to resist saying those new words. If you say them just because they pop up into your mind without scaffolding them or supporting them in some way, your students […]
Below is a writing activity by Bob Patrick (Atlanta) that I have chosen to include in the new star sequence book as one of its four “top quality” extension activities. Please look it over and provide comments in the comment fields below. Like Carly’s Carrot activity, it burns a few days at a time of
I am still tinkering with my latest book. I would appreciate feedback on this printable download, if anyone would mind testing it in class and making comments in a comment field below. Here are the instructions: GENERAL: Have a few sentences prepared using information generated during the Create phase. Students hear each sentence three times but write it
This is an updated version of the activity Carly described here in a comment field a few weeks ago in response to her having a lot of extra individually created characters who didn’t get into stories during the course of the year. This assures that they at least got some attention since the artists put
Even though I have explained and repeated over and over why speaking is something I don’t expect, and will not grade, etc. my students still want to speak. I know they are really, really bad at it, and I know it is wasted class time, as per the research when the conscious mind/monitor takes over.
Ben: My sophomore classes this year are the first to have been 100% raised on NTCI. They have acquired about as much as any previous TPRS group at this time of year did in the past with much less stress for me. The BIG, BIG difference is in the quality of our relationship and that
I got this question: How do you get participation grades when you allow students to speak only when they feel like it? A. I am not looking for speech and I don’t give participation grades. I evaluate them on their interaction with me in terms of ACTFL’s Interpersonal Mode of Communication, which is very different
Some newer members of our community may not be aware about something I wrote in a comment to Orlando this morning, so just to repeat the point here: I try to direct the discussion here in the direction of NTCI and not TPRS. Since 2015, after ten years of writing books about TPRS, I finally
Ben, I am finally in a perfect position to retrain myself and be the Spanish teacher I always wanted to be but never was. I taught Spanish full time to begin my teaching career. I love Spanish. I wanted to share that with kids and I so badly wanted them to learn. I was given
When Marianne Van Klaveren adopted the star sequence as her curriculum about a year ago, she made, and I shared here, the drawing below which displayed at a glance all the activities she could do on a trip around the star. This made me very happy, because one of the main goals and one of
A Spatial Curriculum In the past, language instruction has largely involved isolating parts of language (grammar or working from word lists) and then breaking everything down into pieces and analyzing it. This is a left-brain dominant process requiring thinking. It is a process that involves planning and memorizing and testing and filling in blanks and
I believe that sometimes rain can be like a blessing. It’s just something I’ve noticed over the years. This morning in Denver this (link below) is my view from my computer – not rain but big snow flakes. By the way, that’s what air looks like when the cottonwood trees release their pollen at this
