Julie recently wrote here about the absolute prime role of TPR in setting up her vPQA program in November. We have talked about TPR a lot, but, if you are like me, you need to take it up a level. The fact is, having observed Julie and other DPS teachers over the past year, and […]
Hi Ben. I decided that nobody is going to be able to criticize TPRS teachers who show how awesomely effective (and easy) the method is. I have a mixed group: 6 1s, 19 2s and 3 native speakers. Fully unsheltered grammar from Day 1. I am gonna post the beginners’ results publicly (minus kids’ last
Here is a nice report from another one of those truly fine CI teachers in Maine: I am doing well here in Maine. Spring has finally arrived and my kids can play outside without jackets. It’s amazing really, to feel my hair on my bare shoulders!!! What a long frigging winter. I thought I’d write
Robert has sent the notes he promised on the concept of common assessment in response to the thread generated by the evals of Scott and Nathaniel: Hi Ben, Here are the notes that I promised in one of my posts earlier today. I hope they will help Nathaniel and Scott – as well as others
This PPT built by Carol has all the elements of a good vPQA slide show: s’inquiéter chill 1. She introduces the structure in the way in which we always establish meaning by saying “this means that”. 2. She then makes general statements using the target structure – those are the captioned slides. 3. Carol intersperses
This is just a sample of how we might title them: 1. If it is just three target structures that are not being used to backwards plan from some text, it might look like this: Spanish/goes/sees/has/Grant Boulanger 2. If is connected to a script: French/works/the boss yells/lazy/Matava Vol. 1/Ben Slavic 3. If it is from a
Nathaniel Hardt was our PLC Teacher of the Month here in March: https://benslavic.com/blog/teacher-of-the-month-march-2015-nathaniel-hardt/ He was recently observed. That report is below. As we all know, Nathaniel is in a class by himself with comprehension based instruction and clearly knows so much more than the administrator who observed him. The report is not easy to read,
Eric has been kind enough to give us a report on his recent read of VanPatten’s book From Input to Output: It’s only 114 pages and so is way overpriced, but it should be required reading for all FL teachers. As James F. Lee wrote in the Foreword: “. . . some basic notions that
David Young in Kansas City has a question that we need the group’s input on: Ben, Next year I will be teaching mostly French at my high school, Wyandotte High School in Kansas City, Kansas. This is a solution that our counselors came up with to the problem of tons of Native/Heritage speakers of Spanish
Recommendations for Making a vPQA Slide Show on Haiku Deck: (When making a Haiku Deck to share on the PLC, please try to include points 3, 4, 7, and 9 below. Those are our trademark goals for each slide who we make.) Visual PQA (vPQA) Classroom Step by Step Process Choose 3 structures from a
Those who want to try to be part of what will hopefully become our mega vPQA data base of hundreds of slide show lesson plans are invited to start building decks/slide shows. Craig West suggested that we use Haiku Deck and so we will try that. I personally think it’s the right program for this
Things are moving along with our vPQA design for next fall. Like anything new, it’s a bit confusing right now. It will clear up, though. I have added two Primer articles on vPQA. Other articles on how to use Haiku Deck to set up our own PLC library/data base/kick ass lesson plan collection of slide shows
