If you are new to this stuff, there is not that much to worry about over the summer, besides keeping things simple for you and the kids! The three things I want to remember in the fall really are simple. (Simplicity is required at the beginning of the year, when kids are being bombarded with […]
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When you assess a kid on whether he knows certain discrete facts about the language, you kill his interest in it. The tragedy is that his mind already possesses wiring (that we often do not acknowledge) that is easily capable of acquiring the language, if only it were left to its own ways of decoding, which need but
The strangest thing about fully espousing comprehensible input methods, including TPRS, is that in June I’m not exhausted from trying to push a program that essentially doesn’t work down kids’ throats. The kids liked what I taught them last year, and they want more next year. Thank you Dr. Stephen Krashen and Blaine Ray! The
Jim suggested that I turn this recent comment on grading into a blog entry so that we can access it via the categories. Here it is: Most kids have to want to be in the classroom in order for most approaches to grading to be accurate and honest and true indicators of progress. In my
In talking about planning classes, Jim said: “You have to use those assigned structures in CI that will be interesting enough for the student to listen to you, and be able to change things up enough to not lose their attention…the less we plan…perhaps the better we will become at the art of CI.” This
This is from Jim on planning our CI lessons: I do a lot of my backward planning from songs. Of course, this isn’t always the most efficient form of planning (yet), because songs contain an array of high frequency structures and words that we may not be able to get nicely packaged in the form
Liz Hughes is doing a great job down there in Columbia, SC teaching her graduate course on TPRS for the group of Irmo teachers under the leadership of Michel Baker, whose blog by the way is a good one to visit (find link on this blog). I think the homework the workshop attendees got this
I got a question about TPRS asking where the number of 75 repetitions per structure may have come from. Here is an answer that may or may not be accurate: Carol Gaab has said that she has a goal of 75 repetitions for simple structures and up to 150 for more complex structures. Wow. If
It is a good time for rogue bloggers to send me emails for the summer for me to blog here: benslavic@yahoo.com We had the guest blogger program that started in March but we inundated the blog with too much stuff and it became almost unreadable. So folks like Robert, Grant, Matthew, and those Pleaides members,
Dear Ben, I’m wondering what everyone else in this group is doing about grades. Our district now has Zangle, which has a serious disadvantage in that whatever way you set it up at the beginning of the year is the way it will stay all year. No tweaking, unless you want it to affect the
Teachers who work hard don’t necessarily reach their kids. That may be true in other lines of work, but this language game is not about working hard. If it were, parents who aggressively teach their small children language would have more fluent kids later on, but this is not true. It’s just the opposite. Everybody
There is a cool funtion on the blog calendar here – to the right – that I just discovered. If you are looking for a recent blog all you have to do is put the cursor on the day you think it may have been posted and a little square will come up listing the blogs for that
