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. […]
Does anyone know the number of words in the average person’s spoken vocabulary? We in DPS had lunch today and the number 250 came up. Whatever the number is, I know that when we hear it in workshops it is always surprisingly low. I mean, we can and of course will use some words beyond those
Meagan is my colleague at East High here in Denver. Last week she told me about how a kid came into her classroom and asked, “Is it true that four year olds can learn a langauge faster than us?” I loved Meagan’s response: “No, it’s not true. That myth exists because of the way languages
Something else I am trying to learn to expand upon and repeat more and PQA more in a story, besides a strong image, is a well built sentence, something out of the ordinary. We get such sentences, perhaps something in the subjunctive mood, and we should circle them more, because they don’t occur that often.
Michele found this blog from a year ago. One paragraph reveals that I was out of L2 probably 40% or more of the time, and only this year on Diana’s challenge to all of us in DPS was in 90% or more of the time. I finally made the switch after nine years. How many
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
We’re not just talking about a teaching method here, folks. We are talking about employment in a crumbling economy. Those of us who chose to go into the profession did so thinking that we could earn a living from it. But, if the method we use fails us, and our enrollments keep dwindling, and no
Hi Ben, I had an amazing experience today. Our school is doing professional learning communities, starting classes late twice a week so we can work in groups. Patty, Rachel and I had to present this morning on our work in the foreign language department. We told them a little bit about CI-based instruction and I
I got an email from a colleague today. It describes the game of Gotcha! that some teachers put on their kids, as in, “Your work is to memorize lists and verbs – you must do your work at home! – and I’m not really going to speak the language in class or do any meaningful (i.e.
There is a point of critical mass where, if one too many students is confused, heads go down on the desks and we lose the chemistry of the class, to which all must contribute. Then we feel like fools and blame the method. In order to avoid getting to that point of critical mass, we
People have asked me how our Anchorage TPRS group got going. They’d like to have something similar in their communities. Susie thought I should present a “how to” at a TPRS conference, but I knew it would only take about six minutes to explain. Here goes: Ben’s books gave me the concept of today’s TPRS
