I was doing some reading in PQA in a Wink and I think that I started to finally understand what Extended PQA means. It is basically when we take the information gathered from the PQA [Circling w/ balls, Questionnaires, or just talking to the kids in the target structures of the day] and we spin [...]
Entries from July 2008
July 30, 2008
Creativity in Schools
Someone told me about this video and Sir Ken Robinson has a lot of great things to say. One thing I love about about TPRS is that it brings creativity back into the cold, stale classroom. Students start to think of school outside the book in a real way. If we start to bring creativity [...]
July 26, 2008
TPRS and Veggies
Do you ever get the feeling that TPRS is kind of like eating raw vegetables. What I mean is that there is a whole slew of people out there who consume raw vegetables as apart of their daily diet because, well, the body reacts to it better and a person can have an energy that [...]
July 21, 2008
Just try to enjoy yourself
I was watching a movie the other day and there was a scene where two guys were playing golf. The first guy was having a really hard time and was not placing the ball where he wanted. The second guy had no trouble and was putting the ball exactly where he wanted. The scene ended [...]
July 7, 2008
False Beginners
When teaching a language like Spanish I am bound to run into the idea of false beginners. There will be so many different levels of Spanish with my students when they enter the classroom. A false beginner is a student who has prior knowledge of Spanish, but is in a class with true beginners, who [...]
July 7, 2008
What is your life work?
Today someone shared a poem with me that made me think about life on a deeper level. The poem is called ABC by Theo Weinbobst. It is a concrete poem where the author writes one word for each letter in the alphabet starting at A and going to Z. The poem is not just random [...]
July 3, 2008
Tools in the toolbox
I feel like so many teachers out there are trying to gather as many tools as they can. They don’t want to use just one tool because then the kids get bored and learning becomes lethargic. My question is how much of their time is spent on the language versus distracting the kids to get [...]
July 3, 2008
Teaching like Chet
There was a while where I really listened to a lot of Chet Baker, a jazz trumpeter who was most popular in the 50s. There was something about his music that I really liked. It had soul to it. Most jazz musicians know a thing or two about chords. In truth, jazz musicians are some [...]
