The fastest way to make a class feel stupid is to say stuff to them that they can’t understand. Therefore I strenuously suggest that we be very careful before casually starting the year by asking our students in first year courses to be able to process what we think are very basic greetings, which in […]
Tina has the best stance on this. She doesn’t get nervous or worry, fearing a “bad” story, because she doesn’t see a story as bad or good, just what the class did that day. She says that creating a story is a team sport, as it were, and so no one person is in charge
At Invisibles Questioning Level 6 in the Invisibles program, a solution is always easier to find if we bring in some new characters to the existing characters. They help to solve the problem by bringing new possibilities to solving it. Doing that is really a smart move. This point should have been put into the
A few points about Invisibles Questioning Level 5: 1. If we are working from a one word image to start our Invisibles story, we can ask, at the end of the creation of the image and right before the Reveal, what possible problem of the new invisible character might be. This is done in English.
Here is a possible plan for getting our students to easily do what I consider to be the real work at the upper levels – reading and discussing authentic texts with no effort. Because they have heard so much comprehensible input in the first two levels – massive amounts of it – the kids can
The ten finger comprehension checks and required fist signaling moves provide false reads of student comprehension. Many of the students simply lie on the hand comprehension checks, fearful of being perceived as stupid. Moreover, most don’t know, haven’t yet learned in their difficult young lives, how to self advocate. How, then, can they make the
Tina and I are (slowly) working on adding more Bite Size Books to the teachable.com pages. The travel this summer has slowed that process down quite a bit, but by later next year we intend to have a lot more of them. The one on One Word Images (Class Created Images) is very good and
Phil Smith teaches French in Ireland and Tina and I were lucky enough to meet and work with him in Agen last summer in our evening coaching sessions. After this year of creating stories with images created by his kids he sent us a few of them with some valuable insights. I particularly like the Bob et
The Invisibles Star has five points, like a real star. It’s just a metaphor to help us remember the order of our Invisibles strategies from the beginning (the top of the star) around to the part of the star that is at 9:00 p.m. on the schema below if it were a clock. Explaining it
This is just to mention a detail about setting up dictee, one of the spokes of our Invisibles Star. It’s another great idea from Tina: When we start dictée (a few months into the year usually) it’s hard to teach punctuation marks and the dictée process at the same time – the kids can’t absorb
Bryan Whitney shares: Hey Ben – Here are some French 1 resources that I am in the process of putting together (some are more complete than others…), but mainly consist of MovieTalk Powerpoints that can be used as is or you could always use the stories for Story Listening / Storytelling. http://www.thehorizonsthelimit.com/?page_id=230 I’m very excited
Ryan reported in June at the end of the year from Washington State: So, I am sitting here in 1st Period looking at my students’ final exams for Honors Spanish 1, and just started crying. All year, I have been second guessing myself, wondering if I am doing enough, and feeling like a slacker as
