Become a more confident language teacher.
I first played Write, Draw, Pass at our Bible Study end of the year party, and it quickly became one of my favorite party games! At a recent PD class, my colleague Ashley VanHemert pointed out how perfect it is to use as the starting point for communicative input in language classes! Ashley first made…
Read MoreWrite Draw Pass is fast becoming one of my favorite activities for stories, and there is no end to the possibilities.It seems like I have a new revelation of a better way to use the Write, Draw, Pass activity each time I use it! Today, I realized when using it as a story review activity…
Read MoreThis morning, I stared at the pile of Write, Draw, Pass papers that my students had completed with events from El Nuevo Houdini on Friday, trying to think of what I else I could do with them to review the story. I ended up chopping up the completed papers and choosing nine sentence/illustration combos. The…
Read MoreToday, I used Write, Draw, Pass to review a story. Super fun! Instead of having the students invent sentences from out of nowhere, I asked them to write down something that happened in the first five chapter of El Nuevo Houdini. After the activity was complete, I collected the papers and showed them to the…
Read MoreWhy I didn’t think of this before, I’ll never know…but I realized this week while playing Write, Draw, Pass with my students that I can get lots of reps and stories out of what they’ve written–duh! I tell students to write simple, amusing, short sentences. This means that I end up with a lot of…
Read MoreBy now, we’ve all seen it: someone’s district has been hacked, and they must now teach with zero technology for an indefinite time period. In some cases, the school is back online within a few days; more likely, though, it will be several weeks or even longer before teachers can return to teaching with technology.…
Read MoreWhether you call them Stations or Centers, you probably love them—and so do your students. Stations give you a laissez-faire teaching day and provide lots of movement and small group interaction for students. Stations do not, however, come without challenges. Stations often take quite a bit of prep work. For the proficiency oriented, comprehension based…
Read MoreIt’s May. If you’re lucky, you are wrapping up your last week or two of school. If you’re on the East Coast, you are staring down another month and a half of classes. Either way–the sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and you.are.done. Here are ten activities that you can use to carry through…
Read MoreThe Somos Flex curriculum is a unique, multi-strand Spanish curriculum that takes care of lesson planning so that you can focus on the most important thing: connecting with your students. Just as the original SOMOS curriculum has given thousands of teachers the confidence to step into a new way of teaching, so has Somos Flex…
Read MoreIf you are ready to move away from Explicit Language Instruction toward a more Implicit, Acquisition Driven Instructional model, you’ve come to the right place. Making this change is a complete paradigm shift, but it can be done in pieces. If you are ready to focus on helping your students to acquire language, as opposed…
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