Dear Colleagues;

We had a frutiful close to two hour meeting with Steven Maggiore and a colleague of his from McGraw Hill on Friday. Janet, John, Rena, Nandini, Andrea S., and I were present. After an interruption and an internet connection snafu, we did get to see a few of the online INTERACTIONS text components. It has a nice ONLINE visual introduction of each unit with people talking about the topic of the chapter and other imbedded practice exercises, which you can monitor the students' work on with an online gradebook. WE DO HAVE INTERNET CONNECTION in L.A. 243; we just have to figure it out with the current tegrity carts stored in the 2nd floor closet, and Toni is working on writing a basic skills grant proposal for us to get one JUST FOR OURSELVES in that building!!!

We also looked at and talked about a couple McGraw Hill grammar books, after telling Steven we didn't feel there was enough grammar practice. It seems we have come to the consensus of going with INTERACTIONS again, but adding an online around $7 grammar workbook called Grammar Form and Function, which won't be ready for us to look at until sometime in December. The actual grammar text, from where the workbook was derived, looks good though and we should be getting desk copies that you can take a look at soon.

WE WILL BE ORDERING THE TEXTS IN A BUNDLE FOR EACH CLASS, one with the Reading and Writing texts, and the other with the Speaking/Listening, Grammar, and online grammar texts. WE ARE AWAITING THE ISBN nos. McGraw Hill is creating for us. As soon as these come in, I will notify you with the numbers.

There is another grammar book that I would like to check out more, called Grammar Step by Step. The catalogue says the book "presents bite-sized chunks of grammar in two-page lessons that build from engaging listening exercises, to contextualized practice, to communicative acitivities." Steven will be providing a few desk copies of this book, level 3, for us. He also mentioned that we could bring in material from this text and the text of Grammar Form and Function to our classrooms for trial. Perhaps this way we can see if we might like to adopt a different grammar book in the future.

That's it for now. Let me know if you have any questions, Tracey