I get it.
For a teacher, change can feel risky. The admin and the community (parents, teachers and students) have expectations, based on observations, murmurings, your bulletin board, an Open House presentation you gave a few years back…. You have a reputation to uphold. Plus, for years you have tweaked and streamlined and created ancillary materials to accompany the (pre-fab?) curriculum you currently use.
But it’s not really working. The kids aren’t interested or engaged, and their language skills, growth and retention are, ahem,…unremarkable.
By now, you’ve grown more familiar with the Second Language Acquisition research, which points to Comprehensible Input as the primary conduit for language gains. So it’s hard to fathom going back to your grammar-based textbook, or even a curriculum that claims to be new and different… 
but when you delve further, it, too, is filled with conjugation charts, rules about masculine and feminine, singular and plural endings, and thematic vocabulary lists, like, “places in the house,” or, “weather expressions.”
But we don’t communicate in lists.
We can’t go back. We can’t teach letters/sounds with nonsense words, and we can’t continue to teach sets of related nouns, hoping that our kids’ brains will magically fill in the rest of the sentence. And we can’t slice ‘n dice the language into rules and exceptions, tenses and endings, hoping that our kids will reconstitute it like some kind of powdered astronaut food.
We need to scaffold the language, flesh it out, and communicate naturally, at the discourse level. No substitution drills. No scripted dialogues.
We need to provide TONS of comprehensible input so that our students’ brains can unconsciously and deductively uncover its patterns. If we’re new to this, we need strategies and guidelines for how to make the target language comprehensible, compelling and contextualized.
We need a roadmap.
What might a Comprehensible Input-based curriculum look like, considering that we are trying to build language based on student interest and ideas, to keep it compelling? How can we create a flexible course-long sequence to follow (or cherry pick), while laying-in a foundation of the highest-frequency language? Sounds like a tall order for a teacher who is also trying to change her practices, and learn new teaching strategies herself….
There is a way. It’s older than cave-painting, yet it constitutes the latest research-aligned approach:
Stories.
We can create collections of compelling mini stories,+- 10- line fanciful tales or scenes, employing a smattering of the most foundational vocabulary combined with cognates and proper names/places. These could be used to teach our youngest readers, or serve as independent reading for any age group;
We can author interest-based scenes, episodes or chapters for story collections, each with its own parallel readings (different versions), literacy extensions and activities;
We can write (or translate existing) inviting leveled chapter books or novels, geared to the unique needs of Hebrew language learners, controlling vocabulary and syntax to ensure reader ease, pleasure and success;
All these readings, great and small, provide teachers with curricular content – the students and stories are the curriculum – from which to plan her classes. Once she internalizes the new T/CI strategies by practicing with these written collections, she may choose to then abandon the pre-written stories, and collaborate instead with her own students on mini-stories and scenes, episodes and extended stories, or a class-spun novel (it’s been done in other World Language classrooms!) 
But until then, she’ll feel sustained, supported, and balanced by the training wheels of a story-based written curriculum.
I plan to begin writing such a curriculum.
Students and stories. Students’ interests and ideas, magically spun to create customized group stories. Stories, creating an imaginative and magical context for foundational language.
Students, stories, inventiveness and communication. Rules, verb endings, tenses, and lists.
Let’s call it: No contest.
I knew we needed to keep playing with the hi-frequency language we’d used thus far, and I was wary to start introducing more new words. The previous (Sunday) Hebrew class was so short – I teach three consecutive 20-minute classes – and with transition and settling time, the kids barely get 12-15 minutes of Hebrew instruction. Wednesday’s 35-minute classes are the heart of the program.
Our scene went absolutely NOWHERE. The initial query, “Are you tired?” set the docket for the rest of class. We simply and gleefully played with the unlikely possibility of taking a teacher-sanctioned nap in Hebrew class. We explored each actor’s interpretation, one after the next, affording lots of silliness, laughter, and compelling repetition.
For nearly 25 minutes we spent time in Hebrew trying to track down felafel for our hungry protagonist. First she went to Maggiano’s, our Italian venue, hungrily seeking felafel. I accompanied her across the classroom toward the Maggiano’s poster, where a Maggiano’s representative/classmate was waiting, a luscious slice of (plastic) pizza in one fist, a rubbery beige disc of coiled pasta in the other. I did the talking while my actors silently brought our drama to life. As dramatic director, I coached Leah to rub her stomach, stating that she loves felafel, while the class confirmed that no, unfortunately Maggiano’s doesn’t have felafel. It has pizza, and it has spaghetti.
I wanted our kids to walk away feeling encouraged. And successful. And smiling. Those were my ‘curricular goals’ from which I decided to backwards-plan. No worries about hi-frequency structures, circling, repetitions, or the like… yet. Just a fun, informal meeting & intro with some back-and-forth Hebrew communication.
miliar routines (i.e., greeting/goodbye song) which provide much needed structure for the wee ones. But alas, my classroom is sweaty (no air conditioning); the chairs are hard (transitioning from the rug and plenty of stretching and movement can only help so much!) and the kids are tired, hungry, need a Band-Aid, want a drink, have a tummy ache, just lost a tooth…in short, they find it hard to stay focused. This will change as they grow accustomed to the new school year and schedule, but it means that I can’t expect or push too much…yet. Limited language input, no full-on circling, lots of movement (we did some modified yoga poses) and plenty of props. We picked our favorite (plastic) snacks and using “want” and “looks for,” we pretended to eat them.
he teacher (I have established a fist pounding the palm action/noise signal) if meaning is not clear. I used to say, “Signal me if you don’t understand,” but really, folks, the onus is on us, the teachers, to make sure we are comprehensible, so I tweaked my poster language to reflect that reality. I walk over and fist bump the student who signals me (!יש), reinforcing my standard: “Thank you for letting me know I was not understandable! It’s my job to make sure everyone understands! We’re all here to understand Hebrew messages!” I translate the problematic word/phrase/utterance, gesture and re-check for comprehensibility. Alas, you should know that young learners often do not signal when they’ve fallen off the comprehension train, so eager are they to extract meaning that they forget. So we must redouble our efforts, frequently checking for comprehension: “What does ‘XYZ’ mean?” “What did I just say?” and constantly recycle and repeat, reviewing the facts of the story once again before adding on to it.
End class with a predictable exit routine. In my Spanish class, I adopted this courteous call & response from master Comprehensible Input teacher, 
