We all know about this phenomenon of “helicopter parents”. In a recent email exchange between Alisa and me, she made some points worth sharing. (By the way, anything I share here from private email correspondence will have always been approved by the sender, just fyi.) Ben, I believe this particular [helicopter] parent was listening to […]
If anyone wants some good simple stories to read in French, Meg has provided a link and thank you Meg: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MORNMH9OfnQWWjbADpxb5R1gn9guLFF4
Since FVR is not voluntary, Tina and I have espoused the term Free Choice Reading to describe how we start our classes. But that’s not the purpose of this post, rather to just let everyone know that Greg has a video we can watch on how he built his classroom library: Greg reports: I built
From Dana: Hi guys, I have a question for you. How can we expect the kids to only speak in the TL if they’ve only had 1,2 or 3 “years” of it? I just finished reading Bryce’s administrator checklist where it says that teacher and students are speaking the TL, and I remember reading Annabelle’s
In our desire to plan this, plan that, get control of our stories, have a lot of charts on the wall (most of which only serve to confuse students), and then the next day do it again, squeezing all the LIFE AND SPONTANEITY out of our classes, we miss the entire point. For those like
This passage is from Herbert Kohl’s “The Open Classroom”: “Lesson plans are supposed to spell out what the teacher is going to do in his classroom day to day, week to week, and even month to month. They are designed to make it possible for administrators to say what ought to be happening at a
This is to inform the group that we have a colleague, fellow group member in Senegal so maybe if everyone knows Rachel is there we can keep her on our radar to help in any way possible. She is doing important work: Hi Ben and Tina! My name is Rachael Cox, and I am a
Sleep deprivation in the U.S. is a true thing. It is bad when teachers can’t sleep and then have to be all bright eyed and bushytailed in the morning, especially since our work with stories requires cheerfulness, even fake cheerfulness (fake it ’till you make it…) to be effective. I don’t sleep much at all.
Hi guys, Yesterday, I started my advanced class off with FCR like I always do and that was great. Then I started to chat about the weekend and the calendar like I always do and I quickly realized that my students were “off”. They interrupted me about 10 times in a span of 4 minutes
I just wanted to share that Sean Lawler has joined our group. It’s a big deal and it makes me very happy and I will tell you why: Sean goes back in this group at least 10 years. In previous iterations of this blog he was a true and constant leader, spurring on conversation after
Here is a question for the group: I have been using the “Ben Slavic Classroom Rules” for about 8 years. BUT. They do not address things that I need to address in this school that still feels like it’s on a different planet. For example, I feel like I need the following rules in addition
Dana Miller Kitch, from Canada, replaced me at the American Embassy School in India this year (2017-2018) and it was very good to know that a CI teacher was going to be there for those wonderful middle schoolers. (Tina and I worked with Dana in training her on the Invisibles before she went to India
