Focus on the kids. What does this mean? We are teaching students, not a curriculum. The students have to get it. They won’t get it if they don’t pay attention. And they won’t pay attention unless it is interesting to them. The most interesting subject to high school age students is THEMSELVES. We talk […]
Bryce sent this and it is long, so I will post it as separate installments over this week: Installment #1: Ben, For years I had signs up at the back of my classroom to help me remember the basics. They were gleaned from Blaine, Susie, Joe, you and others. Now, whenever I have a student
Bryce asked Blaine the following question: Blaine – There is a thread on benslavic.com (blog) about staying in English and comprehensible input right now. I started it off with a quote that I have heard you use from the novel Speak by Laurie Anderson. The blog is titled “The 90% -99% Jump”. People are really
I took the following from a couple of comments I made on the blog today about the entire discussion about how backwards design may fit with student generated stories (Michele calls them skeleton stories), and how those fit with embedded readings as per Laurie Clarcq. Below I explain how I did those things today, on
Backwards Design + Skeleton Stories + Embedded Readings Read More »
I have a first period student whose year has been very hard, as only ninth grade can be, and who has caused me some real stress. I have been talking with mom a lot, and moved the child to sit right next to me in class. I have been applying a lot of what we have
Sylvia, who works with AIM up in Canada, sent these links. The second one is really amazing because of the recall level of details of the kids – they remembered every single detail of a story! As you know, I have started a blog following the progress of my first year AIM students. I also
Ben, Since we talked last weekend I have been taking up your and Diana Noonan’s (DPS World Languages Coordinator) challenge/mandate of using less English in the classroom. It seemed like an odd idea, after all, I LOVE speaking in Spanish with my students! There is such a sweet smell that fills the class when we
K continues her reports: “Some of the kids that I do stories with at lunch are at the point where they can do a 5 minute freewrite, and so we do 1 everyday. Normally, they just write and then a few share what they wrote, or see if I can read it. The other day, I
Diana Grieman and I were talking about order of acquisition. She said this: And as you’ve been saying, probably the very most important thing that we can do is to stay as much as possible in the target language. That, I think, is bigger than order of acquisition and complexity. From lots of CI, the
Sorry K I’ve dropped the ball on these recent emails, and thank you for the updates: Reaction of teachers to our story: It was, and still is GREAT! I talked to all of the teachers afterwards. They were all laughing and smiling. I had one person say “That was so great… I’ve not had kids
Dirk asks: Is there anyone else in Portland, Oregon doing what we do? I would kill to have an actual colleague here… Thanks. Dirk
I was just watching The Office and Phyllis said, “We all have the right to be with somebody who wants to be with us.” I love that. Applied to our classroom, it puts into perspective the incredible weeding out of students over the past decades by teachers who tell kids, at each successive level of
