Finding Inspiration in Your Building

Lately, I have been finding a wonderful source for inspiration in my school– other teachers. Do we ever look for these teachers or are we more impacted by the teachers that are less passionate? I found an inspiring teacher in my school and it happened to be the art teacher. She is so positive and really thinks about the students on a deep level. One thing that she mentioned was teaching to the 3 different modalities of learning, which will help us to activate acquisition. The modalities are

• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinesthetic

I had heard them before, but just talking about it with another teacher really brought them to life and I felt like I was really learning a lot. We use these a lot in Comprehensible Input methods, especially TPRS®. Not only was I inspired by the teacher, I was also encouraged by local teacher. I want to encourage you to be on the look out for inspiring teachers in your building. It really can make a difference in your day.

Click on the picture to go to a website for explanation and examples.

Sir Ken Robinson – Changing Paradigms

Below I embedded a short excerpt from Sir Ken Robinsons speech on Changing Paradigms and also the full version below it. Pretty interesting stuff.

Frequency words

I have been getting a lot out of Michel Baker’s blog! In the blog below she identifies two really helpful tools by Mark Davies. I was aware of his frequency dictionary, but not the online corpus. What a helpful resource for Spanish teachers! We can now look at the frequency dictionary to target which words [especially verbs] to use and then use the corpus to decide which forms of the verbs have the highest frequency. Click on the picture to go to Michel’s blog post.

Ira Glass – Weird Stories – MS Curriculum

Find it on youtube here!

Ira Glass on Storytelling part 2 [youtube part 4]

Here is one more segment from Ira Glass that I found to be helpful on storytelling. Reflective moments in our stories make them more real and apart of life, rather than just some random story that we are telling as a class. Although in the interview he is approaching stories from more of a journalism perspective, I think that this idea that we are adding what we think and what our students think about what is going on in the story is an important aspect that is often overlooked in powerful storytelling. Check it out…

Ira Glass on Storytelling

I found this link on Michel Bakers blog. [the link to her blog is above under more blogs] She has a lot of solid basic ideas for stortelling that really made sense. Check it out.

Level 1 Story – 2.2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvQCYsByuJ0&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1

Eduplace.com Graphic Organizers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUrMqzclMIA

Classroom Tour

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmrvuitvjWg

Brief 7th grade Exploratory Footage

Here is some brief footage of a 7th grade Exploratory class. It is in the TPR phase where we are creating little situations of the words that we just previously worked with. I find that after we practice the words via TPR, the students like to see each other in little situations and it gives them more meaningful repetition of the words. It makes the words come alive and we aren’t just practicing, but they are seeing them in action.

Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FSOyAlfhPQ