Teaching from the Heart

I have been reading a lot from Ben Slavic lately. One theme that I get from a lot of his readings is the idea of teaching from the heart. At first I wasn’t so sure what he meant, but I think that I understood a little more today.
It means making a personal connection with the [...]

What did I miss?

I had a student come up to me and ask me what she missed on Thursday and Friday of last week. I was happy that she came in because so many students just don’t do anything. The more I talked to her, the more the feeling that I got that she wasn’t serious about the [...]

Just talking

I was reading some of Susan Gross’s articles and she mentioned that one year she just decided to throw the book out and just talk to the kids. I really liked this approach and it made me want to try this more.Imagine just talking with the class the whole entire time in comprehensible input so [...]

The goal for stories is to reach the kids

This came from Ben Slavic’s blog about using the ideas of Krashen to reach kids. At the end he made a great closing point that is good to keep in mind when telling the stories.
Maybe we should spend less time wrestling with learning how to create stories and just use a few storytelling techniques to [...]

Keeping Records

I was reminded today that it is so important to keep good records. It takes a little extra time, but it makes life so much easier in the end when you need it. Keeping good records helps me as a teacher to keep my brain available for other tasks. It also is a visual representation [...]

Encouraging parent calls

I decided to make a couple of phone calls the other day to some parents. Two of the calls were to let the parents know that their child was doing well and had been improving. The other call was to let a parent know that their child had done poor on the last unit and [...]

Stories make lasting memories

Here is a comment from Laura Lane. I got it from Ben Slavic’s blog.
I am convinced, more and more, that teaching students to develop an ear for the language, within a caring environment in which language is acquired through stories, rather than through the memorizing of rules, is the key to success in WL classrooms. [...]

Teaching what they want

I have decided that toward the end I am going to have to teach more grammar. It is not because I want to, but because I care about the kids. This last unit, I worked really hard to get the kids to understand what was happening in the book, only to arrive at a final [...]

Support from other teachers

As a young teacher, support from other teachers is invaluable. This semester I have been able to get support from many teachers and it has made the difference in the world. Today, I had a difficult conversation and it made me feel a little frustrated. From a few desks over I heard, “Hey, you want [...]

The levels in FL defined

This is not meant to be an end all be all. Just some ideas.
A World Language level program could look like this:
Exploratory: This is from Ben Slavic-to interest the kids in the culture and the language. That’s all. Consequently, to treat it as an academic subject misses the point.
Level I and II: Beginning stage, full [...]