Remember back in the Dark Ages when teachers would set the class up around a kind of temple (their desk) and then anoint the temple with their holy book (the textbook)? For those who can remember it, those were dark days indeed. That focus on the book and (God help us all!) worksheets left out […]
I heard somewhere that the biggest temptation of the artist is to try to reproduce her work. That is probably because inspiration can’t be cloned as per some formula. I try to keep that idea in mind when working with comprehensible input. I accept that every class will be different, and that there will be very
This is from 2009. I republish it here because the end of this article ties in very neatly with what Nathaniel Hardt recently wrote (published as a post here yesterday and added recently to the Primer hard link) about the dangers of mixing our way of teaching with the textbook. This article, which I just happened to come across, is a strong
Personalization is a two way street. The kids must sense in the PQA that we really care, as a person, about them, in the midst of all of the questionning. Susan Gross has pointed this out to us so many times. However, it is sometimes very hard for us to genuinely approach our kids with open heart
We water the garden of writing with big buckets of listening. We plant the garden of writing in soil that has been richly composted with plenty of reading. The writing plants grow slowly at first, but if they are left alone (i.e. little to no error correction, focus on concepts of errors, not specific errors), they emerge to be
The Garden Of Writing Needs Plenty of Water and Good Soil Read More »
A repost: Each year, when I plant my flower garden, I first prepare the soil. I turn it over and pour into it the tons of the training I have received from my teacher, Susan. The soil thus tilled just keeps getting more and more rich and fertile. Each year, I look forward to planting the soil.
We come to input based instruction with unnecessary trepidation. We think that it is too difficult, but it is not. We merely make it difficult by bringing older models of instruction to this new model, mixing them. It is not necessary. We must lose the notion that that we have to teach certain things, to
In The Power of Reading, Insights From The Research, Stephen Krashen mentions the importance of flow in reading (p. 29). Why shouldn’t this same concept be a key part of our focus as we learn to get better and better at delivering listening input to our students in the form of PQA and stories? Water runs down mountains
This is a reposting of an article I wrote here in 2009: I had an insight after talking to parents for eight hours over two days during parent conferences. In talking to the parents I took away a feeling that they first and foremost want their kids to experience a feeling of success in my
I think of a classroom in which the kids feel no stress. All they have to do is listen in a happy way to the French language. The room can be described by this line from Baudelaire’s L’Invitation au voyage: Là,tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté. There, all is order and beauty,
I got these questions: Q. What do you think of the idea of teaching students the American Sign Language sign just for the structure words and not for all the other words that students offer when asking a story or otherwise? This way, they would be getting a lot of ASL words that they could
In TPRS, as in any narrative method, we don’t need a lot of tricks. We just need to make ourselves understood, using those skills that work best for us. For me, it is word wall work, point and pause, SLOW, trips into the bizarre, and mega-personalization, and circling. It may be other skills for others.
