I would share the Table of Contents here but it doesn’t format very well when pasted from the actual text – it’s a whopper of a table of contents and reveals a collection of every single good TPRS/CI idea I’ve ever had in the past twenty years, all rolled into a single passage.
Here is just one reaction that I got today from a teacher who has been using the book this year:
…Good morning, Ben! I have read the book nearly cover to cover and I love it! We are a trauma informed school district and we heavily emphasize connections with students and meeting them where they are at. The principles in the Invisibles line up so beautifully with our district goals so I am so excited to get this in place for next year. I am using our “extended” spring break right now to read and re-read so I will be prepared!
Thanks so much for all you do!….
Ashley
So here is, over the next months, the complete text of what I can say with authority and truthfulness my last contribution to the CI literature:
Author’s Note
This book expands on ideas presented in three preceding books – the Big CI Book, A Natural Approach to Stories and A Natural Approach to the Year.
The Big CI Book (2014) provides activities that show you how to use CI in your classroom to communicate deeply with even unwilling students.
A Natural Approach to Stories (2016) lays out an entirely new language curriculum design based on drawings of student-created characters – or “invisibles” – a way of teaching languages that I invented while at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India in 2015-2016.
A Natural Approach to the Year (2017) expands on the ideas presented in The Big CI Book and A Natural Approach to Stories, fashioning them into a suggested year-round curriculum.
This book – The Invisibles (2019) – expands on the foundational concepts that appear in the earlier three books. It does so via a unique and breakthrough language curriculum model called the Star Sequence Curriculum. The Star puts the ideas presented in my earlier books into one powerful taxonomy that, once in place in your classroom, will blow away all preceding concepts you might have had of what a language curriculum should even be.
Besides providing the new information about the Invisibles, this book was also written to clarify some of the rather convoluted information that has found its way onto the internet about various aspects of the Invisibles and One Word Images by laying out how they were originally meant to be used.
The book is easy to follow, but there are lots and lots of details to learn, especially if you are new to comprehensible input-based language instruction. So, I highly suggest that you work only in Category A first and stay there for many months or the entire year if necessary (not likely to happen).?
The value of Category A is that it provides you with the training wheels necessary to move successfully on to the other categories. It is the “training wheels” category, the solid foundation that teachers always require when trying something new in their classrooms. Move on to Category B only when you have complete confidence in what you are doing in Category. A.
Make certain, as well, that you know what the term “taking a journey around the Star Sequence” means.
The six categories and the powerful Star Sequence provide the structure and function for all the activities in the book – they unlock comprehensible input in your classroom in ways that are unequalled in other CI approaches.