If you are new to all this, before you get too nervous about the changes that you wish to implement next year, I offer one important idea to hold on to – just take an image and work with it and stay with it and don’t go into any other stuff too fast. What does […]
This post from 2008 is from my book PQA in a Wink! It offers a way to deal with troubled kids that is based in kindness: Mildred is the captain of the girl’s basketball team. She is rough. She had to be rough because she was thrown around physically by her abusive parents in a
The Circling with Balls activity (this site/resources/workshop handouts), is an excellent way to begin the year in first year classes because it addresses both the personalization piece and the establishment of the rules piece (see this site/posters for the most current version of the rules that I have developed over the years). By getting to know the
Here is another blog for our “beginning the year” category. It is a third thing with potential to help start the year next year – one word images. They do such a good job of embellishing the vocabulary and creating a sense of fun right away, not to mention providing perhaps the very best activity
We created a “beginning the year” category here a few months ago. Here are a few quick additions to that list, which I will time stamp as well for August. First, there is no doubt that TPR is in for a renaissance in my CI classroom. A lot of us seem to have been thinking
Make it clear to them that periods of silence, when the class is trying to come up with cute answers to a question, are welcome. Just sit there in that quiet space. It’s o.k. – sometimes everybody needs time to think. If the silence really drags out, do a retell right then. Then watch
Meagan told me an idea for next year. I think it has a lot of potential in immediate and front loaded personalization. You ask the kids to bring in images of their “mascotas” or family pets or any animal that they find important to them. Those critters then become potential drop in characters into stories.
Every now and again I have to take comments and make them into blogs so that they can be searched. So sorry if they’re on here twice. Jim’s stuff below about illustrating stories (I asked him to expand on an earlier comment) expands on the original thought of how, mechanically, to get the kids into
This is a recent comment by Jim that I am making into a blog so that I can add it to a new category on the right of this page called “Beginning the Year”. There is a lot that could go in there, but those posts are just too hard to access now. One good
Michele and I were talking about what to do next year and here are some of her resolutions with my responses italicized. I think that there are more in another email she sent me and Michele you can add them as a comment if you find them. I think it is good for us to know what we intend
The Big Picture has been a wonderful resource for me this year. Most of what shows up is related to current news footage, and as such is mostly useful for my 3 / 4 combined class who enjoy talking about the real world, but even then, I only pick and choose (Useful: Oil Slick in
I really appreciate Nathan’s kind response to my request that he expand on a comment he made here about using pictures in our CI classrooms. Here is a nice text that really lays out a lot of details about this thread that Jim started last week: I love having my students surf the internet to find
