Those six principles/”core practices” – I have to put them in quotes because I can’t take them seriously – that Alisa brought up won’t leave my mind, and hence me, alone, since I am what I think. Kind of. I keep thinking about them. They are just too juicily wrong and out of touch with […]
Well, the weather just turned cold here in Colorado after five months of perfect mountain weather. It had to happen. I have been going through old files and I found four quotes that might help us deal with another Monday morning in that very strange month in school buildings called October: The first is from
I have been going through old Google docs and found 98 pages of old blog articles from before 2007. Some may want to peruse them. But keep in mind that they are very TPRS oriented and were written way before the NTCI thing happened (2016): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AJFFDTJmEDjbd455DjZHOBS_5MBjJ9NKEWtBvZbySyc/edit
Greg wrote this cool power point on A Natural Approach to Stories, which I think in many ways is an even more important book than A Natural Approach to the Year: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12oBa_3fzgiJuxvPdmpzj8LRxyqGWmJMs8fAxLqXa6tc/edit#slide=id.g2a2aee8035_0_29
Question for anyone in the group on the scripts: Hello Ben, I just purchased the 97 Scripts (Matava) from your website. Thanks for making it available! Question: Do you think it might be a good idea (apart from creating a story with the whole class) to provide students with the script so they can create
When you do non-targeted input you end up creating much bigger CI swimming pools in your classrooms. But when you try to limit the vocabulary being learned to certain words that someone told you to teach from a list, you’re in the small pool; you’re almost in the kiddie pool. Not trying to control everything
We in this online community should be so very appreciative of our Alisa for her unlimited and always expanding awareness of what is going on in our profession. In what looks like some serious backsliding in mainstream WL education, there is a new term out there called “WL Core Practices” that didn’t get by Alisa’s
This is from Anne: Hi Ben, I can’t remember if I read this somewhere or if I made it up myself: Every day of the year is National Something-Or-Other Day. Most days it’s 3 or 4 things. On nationaldaycalendar.com you can find a list; you can also get put on a mailing list and receive
It helps to be happy in this work. No. We have to be happy to do this work. We are communicating with children all day! What happens if we communicate anything but happiness to them? I am sure that most of them already experience negativity from others in their days. Just taking a guess on
We try to keep our discussion here mainly about strategies/best practices, but a lot of talk gets in about how to deal with opposition within our buildings*. That’s fine. We need to be reminded often that there are a whole lot of people who are upset about the new trails we are blazing in what
The center part of a sunflower, where all the seeds are, can get full of seeds and get almost too big. That center part of the sunflower compares to the story, where each seed is another detail in the story. A story can get too big too. There is nothing wrong with that. Not so
From Alisa who teaches both Spanish and Hebrew in Chicago. Hers is an important question and maybe someone in the group can suggest a possible direction, although the questioner herself is a world expert in the field, but in the real way because she walks the walk every day in her classroom: Amigos, I was
