I spent many years working hard trying to make sure that things got funny in stories. I would think outside of class of ways to bring in a certain celebrity, or some fact about a kid, so that, if it weren’t a home run story, it would at least be at least a single or […]

Making a story with the Invisibles is truly a team effort. So remind your students to be on the lookout for those little insight moments – those moments to milk – that, in a second, can improve the quality of the movie being made in the minds of your students via a catch phrase. There

We take delight in leaving our old stodgy paranoid piece of our teacher self behind. We relax no matter how hard it is for us. All we have to do is be aware of our intention to be relaxed and milk the right sentences and do the only thing that we really have to do

The idea of milking certain sentences to let the story have more freedom and thus more interest is one that challenges us to step outside of our comfort zones. We pretty much have to let go of control if we want the story to be charged with interest. We can’t just let our own internal

When we let go of trying to teach the language in favor of letting those milking moments drive the story, we change. We become real teachers. It’s as if we don’t even care if they learn it, because in those moments of freedom, of rendering that one line quickly, in a high voice, with sadness,

Milking a phrase is of course scary, but only at first. Really, it is so much fun, and largely because you are released from having to know what it going to happen next. Now that is NTCI and when you first do it in class, you feel like something great just happened. Maybe in those

When we don’t target, we are much more aware of the kinds of cool sentences described in the last post because when we don’t target we align with the flow of language and not shackled language. Thus, everyone who works with NTCI eventually creates their own process. Non-targeting (Invisibles, OWI, etc.) frees our work. Like if a

One skill maybe to focus on after the break would be to milk statements more. Anyone who has done CI knows that roughly every tenth thing a class says, or maybe every twentieth, is different (i.e. funnier, more interesting, of a higher quality in sound or meaning, etc.), and gives us pause and makes us

I just took Julia’s survey on NTCI and it only took about 15 minutes. I embrace this attempt by her to record opinions about NTCI. The thing is, I don’t know how many of us here actually are even doing NTCI as described in A Natural Approach to Stores (ANATS) and in A Natural Approach

I just got a student in my class. Came from conventional high school with an “A” transfer grade. I think that means that this student had looked up all the worksheet answers online and the teacher gave him an A. He doesn’t actually know any Spanish at all though. None of the question words, not

We want complete buy-in from our students when creating a one word image with them. This requires that we are 100% understood when building the image. Here is one way to accomplish that goal. The process is done in English: (1) First, point to the space with respect. Convey the idea to the students that