A repost from last year, before ANATTY: It always comes down to submitting docs, it seems, and we just need to get the problem solved. If anyone has a middle school unit plan S/S we need one for a middle school teacher: Basically she says that after ten years of TPRS, in the past three […]

5 Step OWI Process 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

A questionable quality found in teachers is perfectionism. So when they see that the new game (CI) is better than the old game (grammar worksheets), they delay entry into the new game because they don’t have anywhere near the command over it that they had over the old game. No blame, but Anne Lamott below

Communication is not about trying to say the same word or grammar concept a number of times over and over in class. Communication is about sharing ideas. It is about focusing on the people with whom we are communicating. Communication is not about teaching lists of words. It is about learning about the other person

Most of us take on stuff in our classrooms that isn’t our responsibility. We do everything in our power to uplift others and make them feel better so we can make all the comprehensible input work better and thus feel better ourselves too. The Invisibles approach works to bring a lot of happiness, levels of

Those who go back over the years know that the mental health piece has emerged, percolated to the top, as the most important thing we discuss here. So as we now start moving into the thick part of the year, we need to reinforce, always reinforce, our mental health. Otherwise, this job is just too

Here is a repost from 2016 for Dana, following our recent discussion on the 25 minute thing on NTCI stories: There are, of course, many keys to success with storytelling. But one of the most important is brevity. We tend to clutter our stories with too many facts and then we wonder why our kids

The problem we face is one of intent. If our intention is to use stories to deliver instructional services, and thus please those who run the schools, then we will fail in our mission to teach the children the language. On the other hand, if we use stories to bring joy to children, joy that

Q How can I incorporate 100% CI into my classroom using: Invisibles/OWI/story listening while writing/incorporating a curriculum?  If we stop having those weekly or monthly markers for certain words that are supposed to have been taught by a certain date, we have the luxury of not being tied down into small increments of time by

Hi Ben – I’d like to know what you, or the group, would suggest for classes that just don’t work. By “don’t work” I mean they lack the interest, motivation or communication skills to do what a CI class should be able to do.Classes that will not abide by the 6 simple rules and that

When we ask students to produce writing or speech to align with some kind of desired outcome written in a document somewhere, in the form of either an observable skill or a measurable content task, it inevitably results in a portion of the students feeling not as good as others in the class, or better

Who has indicated interest in working with Julia on her NTCI project? (Texas A&M). We need email addresses. Pls. send to julia.lynch@tamu.edu