Personalize Your Classroom Right Away

What Skip said in a recent comment here prompted these thoughts on starting the year:
We personalize our classroom to start the year. What does that mean? In my view, it means putting the kid in front of the instruction.
Comprehensible input without the personalization piece is not nearly as effective as personalized comprehensible input. Susan Gross said it in this way:
CI + P = TPRS
So, when we start the year in the fall, we want to make sure that we have specific strategies to personalize our classrooms. The activities that I use are described in PQA in a Wink!
The most effective first few weeks activities are the Circling with Balls activity and the Name Game. Both are described on this site on the resources/workshop handouts link.
It just makes sense. Once a kid feels left out, it’s over. Out comes the cell phone, because, in what is really a sad scenario played out countlessly in our nation’s classrooms, at least in their cell phone there is somebody that cares about them.
That’s really what the cell phones are about, right? They challenge us to make our classrooms more interesting to the kids in them, and there is nothing more interesting to a kid than herself. The cell phones challenge us to include everybody, as per Alfie Kohn. The cells phones are talking to us.

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1 thought on “Personalize Your Classroom Right Away”

  1. Actually, that is not what I said. Here is what I said (in fact it is on one of my posters)
    Formula for language acquisition = CI + P
    No need to do TPR Storytelling, or pictures, or music, or a book, or poetry, or a movie. Just CI + P. However it is easier to have things like stories and books to keep the CI flowing. Ask any grandma or daddy and they will tell you that in order to provide CI that is Personally relevant to the baby, we rely on props and books and the baby’s body and anything else that might grab the baby’s attention. That’s all you need. Language acquisition will take care of itself.

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