I really appreciate Nathan’s kind response to my request that he expand on a comment he made here about using pictures in our CI classrooms. Here is a nice text that really lays out a lot of details about this thread that Jim started last week: I love having my students surf the internet to find […]
Some of us have had a lot of success this spring working with student generated texts, thanks to Michele. Having kids generate written texts is but a natural extension of having kids make verbal suggestions during stories. If verbal suggestions in stories work to personalize our instruction, then if follows that their written material can do
In our department we have been wrestling with the question of what to require when in the curriculum. Do we agree that first-year students should only be asked to demonstrate comprehension? At what point can/ should we require output, at what point should we assess it, and by what means? I suppose we could refer
Four legs on the floor. Wooden seat. A back. It’s a chair, just a chair. Is that so? I asked my sixth graders to give me their thoughts on “the chair”: Antonia and others: It’s cool. It’s different than any other chair in the room. It’s higher. You can swing your legs and they
Jody Noble – The Special Chair/La Silla Especial Read More »
I got this email a few days ago from Haiyun Lu, and am happy to print it here with her permission: Hi Ben, This is Haiyun Lu from Wisconsin. I’m a Chinese teacher in a local independent school and I teach 8-12 graders Chinese. Last year, I bought TPRS in a Year! from you after
DIGESTING INPUT and OUTPUT This is a hodgepodge of recent thoughts on the benslavic.com blog that I have tried to organize to help me think more clearly about input and output: Susan Gross: “My really BIG ERROR (How did I forget to put it down as number one or two???): Output. I thought that
Hi all, I’m pretty thrilled about this…a five-hour interview got almost everything right! Go to: thttp://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:c9kxm45_UTwJ:www.neaalaska.org/nea/sites/default/files/maraprilaktivist10.pdf+NEA+aktivist+michele+whaley&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg4BoF42ao2_ZGeMgLJRDNjlNbQXQB3hLgKqk7rMgmKNHNQZkrEoudRXaGBj_FdP3QogFYoC9ftLjUf1KNYhAM-63gF_Yf2BFpsdXkgxJ07KDsrX0_tu1pbWjOThFlqlTR1oScm&sig=AHIEtbSHcF8M51EtVoDwkWvXT8rYCtdrDw and check page 5…or google “NEA Aktivist Michele Whaley” and the same thing will come up. The part that is particularly wonderful about this is that Katya presented at our local Bilingual Conference last week. I’d never been before,
Katya Paukova just spent four days teaching in Anchorage. If you haven’t watched her, find a way. She’s going to be a little less available for a while now, because of a full-time teaching job at DLI, so the moment there is an opportunity, take it. Katya taught an auditorium of 300 people Russian for
Michele Whaley – Learning From Katya In Anchorage Read More »
A picture is worth a thousand words. The link below – sent from chill – is worth a million scholarly articles about how we acquire languages. Chill asked us to …notice the correct use of the plus-que-parfait AND the passé simple!! The natural language of mother and child sent to me by one of my
When we first start the year, how do we view our students? Much effort has been made in TPRS® to really welcome students and to respect them as creative individuals. I know this to be true and do my best to apply it every day. In his book, Push Back the Desks, Albert Cullum describes his
If we need a lot of reps on the three structures before leaving the PQA and starting in with the story, then what happens when we do PQA for, like, 30 minutes and then we are stuck with only fifteen or so for the story, not to mention the quick quiz? Should we just stay
Jennifer Kelly shares below about how a return to circling more often has helped her. It is a good reminder, because we get caught up in so much during a lesson that we forget how many times the kids need to hear a structure repeated. I suggest that we all really focus on circling for
