I’ve been loving CI for a long time but I’ve always been “targeted”: guided by a carefully chosen vocabulary list, following thematic units and searching for movie clips/ photos/ novels/ etc to achieve those ever important repetitions of my “targeted” curriculum. It’s worked for me and I’ve loved it…but…

There’s this Whole New World out there (cue the Aladdin soundtrack) of untargeted CI- you just teach to your kiddos, make everything comprehensible and talk to them about the things they want to talk about. You trust that they’ll get plenty of repetitions of the high frequency vocabulary because, well, it’s high frequency.

I’ve been hearing murmurs of this perspective for a while but I wasn’t ready to jump in. But now… I’m ready and excited. I just got back from the Comprehensible Cascadia Conference in Portland Oregon taught by the fabulous Tina Hargaden and Mike Peto who really focused on the joy and freedom in untargeted CI. (Side note: I’ve watched a million videos of Tina’s teaching (search CI Lift Off in YouTube) and read all Mike’s musings about free reading on his blog so I was super pumped to learn from them AND visit beautiful Portland AND get to see my dear friend (and 2016 Oregon Foreign Language Teacher of the Year!) Rita Barrett!)

I’m still digesting all the great material I learned (and organizing it into future blog posts) so stay tuned! I’m excited about CALP- Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency- teaching them real things like science and history and whatnot using Spanish as the vehicle. Sing with me: A whole new world….

In the meantime, I’m at the airport (again!) for my next adventure: delivering the children’s books my little darlings wrote to kids in Baja California.

Who’s already taken the plunge into Untargeted CI?! I’d love to hear your suggestions and observations!