A picture is worth a thousand words. The link below – sent from chill – is worth a million scholarly articles about how we acquire languages. Chill asked us to …notice the correct use of the plus-que-parfait AND the passé simple!! The natural language of mother and child sent to me by one of my […]
When we first start the year, how do we view our students? Much effort has been made in TPRS® to really welcome students and to respect them as creative individuals. I know this to be true and do my best to apply it every day. In his book, Push Back the Desks, Albert Cullum describes his
If we need a lot of reps on the three structures before leaving the PQA and starting in with the story, then what happens when we do PQA for, like, 30 minutes and then we are stuck with only fifteen or so for the story, not to mention the quick quiz? Should we just stay
Another thing that has been working is to take a class that is reticent to speak, like my level fours (who still think that learning French means constructing it in written form and correcting spelling), and asking them to write a little story for the first ten minutes of each class, then collect it, make
I have been playing around with presenting the structures for a story embedded in a short dictation. I start the class with an easy and loosely constructed, roughly three sentence dictation with the target structures in them. It seems to bring a bit more focus to the presenting of the structures than just listing them, maybe
So many of the characters in stories and PQA are right off the walls. For example, in Picasso’s painting The Old Guitarist, of which I have a copy hanging in the room, the skinny white-haired guy is called ‘Jesus Stefanopolis’ by one of my classes. Just the other day he proposed to one of my
This week I have been cleaning, really really cleaning, out my house in preparation for a move. It’s not the kind of change we often volunteer for because we know how much needs to be done. Change is not for the faint of heart. In order to get to a new place, I have had
I recently asked K for an update on what is happening in her French class. This is the first response I received since that request. It actually comes from her teacher, the person who has allowed this unfoldment of input based methods in her classroom, and who has actively encouraged K’s work with same in the
Ray Bauer asked: Quick question. What is your opinion on teaching the alphabet to elementary school students grades K-6? I am personally totally against it. I prefer to pound the CI. Other teachers in my district want to do units on the alphabet and I feel like our time could be spent better. What is
There is a saying – I think it may be from Laurie Clarcq – that Jim Baird down in Georgia riffed on. Here is the original version: Tell me a fact and I will learn. Tell me the truth and I will believe. But tell me a story and it will live in my
Isn’t it true that we spend more time talking about storytelling than actually doing it? Instead of being mystified by all the talk, maybe we should just practice doing it more in our buildings, so that we can understand it better. It’s time to walk the walk on Krashen. The time for all the talk is
Byron sent this good link: http://jasonbkohl.com/archives/2010/is-it-a-story-or-a-situation/
