Kindergarten Day allows us to see our students in a different way – not so much as students but as real children. We read from picture books like “I Am A Bunny” or “Trains” or from counting books with pictures of things like four apples, and five flowers, etc. We read from these books for […]
Our national parent organization has done a good job of identifying the Communication Standard as what should be the main focus of our work. However, over the past thirty years as the research became more and more clear each year, they never found themselves able to cast off the textbook model, which has almost nothing
A repost: Miriam Met, a trainer like Helena Curtain in the old days, a PhD in language whatever from Philadelphia and a very big deal in language teacher training over many years, came to Denver in 2006 to do a day long training for almost two hundred foreign language teachers in Jefferson County. She was
I can’t wait until the ESL community gets outed for not aligning with the research. It’s coming! Bam!
In the new POST-COVID model of education, teachers must learn how to identify people with narcissistic traits and deal with them so that we have a lot more AUTHORITY and command a lot more RESPECT than we have in the past as teachers. I highly recommend a book by Dr. Christine Northrup called Dodging Energy Vampires.
Morning Ramble: I had a motorcycle when I was younger. I had it long enough to know that – no blame – cars were not trained in SEEING motorcycles, esp. at intersections. I sold it after too many close calls. So it is with kids of color in language classrooms. We have to learn to
Sean said: …we, as teachers, need to know how and where to direct Tanisha so that her voice is given value…. This is the task, indeed! First, we have to know how to teach the class so that Tanisha is included and not excluded bc of interstitial racism. (I know the term is institutional, but
When we create small ten-minute pockets during class for the kids to read whatever they want, called Free Voluntary Reading as per Krashen, we are putting far too much emphasis on that kind of reading. Why? Because the research wasn’t done in classrooms, where there are so many distractions, and where the kids are encountering
I got this question: Ben – I understood that you don’t think it is a good idea to give extended readings to students at the very beginning (novice low, 1). Can you explain further the reasons why? I responded: The reason, and this is only my viewpoint, is that kids read at different speeds and
APCI stands for Activity Pack Comprehensible Input instruction. It’s the application of CI to worksheets to learn lists of words. That’s what’s happened to the CI movement. We need a revolution. TPRS has failed, gone off the rails, gone splat. WE NEED TO STAND UP FOR THE RESEARCH. WE NEED TO REPRESENT THE RESEARCH IN
In my opinion, those who think that they are going make it through the entire online thing using APCI, won’t.
This is from Kate: Hey Ben – Here is something I kept. I have no idea where it came from. It is typed yes, really on a typewriter from back in the day. I have no idea who wrote it. But it fits today as I am sure it did then. Father Spirit, Master of
