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9 thoughts on “Do it Alone, Person to Person”
Ben,
Inspired by you, Diana Noonan and DPS, we are having our first District TPRS training next month in my classroom. We will spend the first 2 hours going over methodology and the last 2 hours with 20 Spanish I kids telling the “afraid of the package” story.
I have been talking about the great things you guys are doing in DPS. We are a long way off from becoming you, but we might be on our way!!
Drew
Drew, this is FANTASTIC !!! Let us know how it goes…we want to know! Have fun!
with love,
Laurie
I am just a novice in CI but am inspired by all of you to share and help guide another teacher in my school in teaching language. The teacher and I are starting a sign language club right now. We met today and he wants to know how to teach it. I advised starting with name cards and something each student liked. He was really excited about this and we will hopefully start next week. I am going to give him some links to videos that he can watch. I am excited as well as I would love to sign. Once you fall in love with CI and the results that you see you want to share it with the world. But true everlasting change really happens person to person.
Absolutely true! This is most “person-based” teaching that I have ever experienced. We only learn the important things by observing and interacting with other people. It’s why we must connect!
with love,
Laurie
Wow Melissa, your signs for the other WL you work with are going to jump now. ASL is so important for us to learn as non-deaf participants in the world and there are so few opportunities to get that basic training. Good luck with your club. I know the young people will be excited to participate.
It’s really great to have a teacher that knows ASL next door so I can learn between classes. He just taught me the sign to laugh and it worked great with my Spanish 1 classes that are using Pobre Ana. There is also a program on PBS that is called Signing Time. I have DVR all the episodes and are learning some that way. It is for kids but I have learned a lot. It might be good for classes that are introducing several languages in one semester. It’s also fun to compare the signs that I have learned on the show Signing Time with the signs that are commonly used in my community. It’s like dialects.
John Piazza sent me an articles a while back about the importance of continuing to gesture. I will try to find it and publish it here – I think it got swallowed up in the queue. I think David Maust tries to keep it in his mindset when teaching is well. If we all could have SOME – not too much – ASL training it might help us to remember to gesture. If we have too much ASL then we and our kids are learning two languages. Right now, I remember very rarely to gesture when I speak – only the old tried and true power verbs like goes. There is a category on gesturing for those interested.
Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/signing-and-gesturing-in-tprs/
Two languages concurrently… but one of them is VERY intuitive. I think ASL during and with instruction (i.e. communication) is way more of a plus than superfluous. Unless you’re trying to teach stuff like letters and colors and things in ASL too, then I would agree that it is too much. But most nouns and verbs, and certain adverbs and prepositions, for sure.
Re the original post (kind of)… I just talked with our superintendent at my tiny school. I asked her if there is some old mission statement for the FL dept (just me) that I don’t know about, or some sort of pedagogy philosophy. She said no, that the admin respects teachers’ professional sovereignty and individual strengths and that they are the best people to make the big decisions like this. But she said I am happy to do so for me and my classes and how I will teach them. Not bad eh? (I hope that is not rubbing it in!!)