Ah, fourth quarter. How I despise you. I think that it is particularly frustrating in Alaska because the days are SO long now–there is still light on the horizon at 10:00pm, and it keeps increasing! Kids are out late and are zonked in the mornings and antsy in the afternoons. After a particularly frustrating day…
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Group Projects
I just finished an epic fail group project: the project itself was a fail, but it did have one small success, and so I will post on that. One of the most difficult and most important steps of developing and assigning a group project is forming the groups. If you let kids choose, some…
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Managing Responses
While preparing for the Yup’ik Immersion training last week, I spent a lot of time scouring the internet for elementary TPRS resources and suggestions. Michel Baker’s blog and Carol Gaab’s article (linked in the YI post) were most helpful. According to their writing, one common obstacle for elementary TPRS teachers is managing student responses during…
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What to do when no one raises their hand…
Gotta Play Games
Today, we played games at the end of each of my classes. Games that had nothing to do with what we were studying. Games that didn’t challenge my students at all. Games that were in Spanish, but games that didn’t help them learn anything new. And you know what? It was fun. Right now, I’m asking…
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Get them talking!
We all have those classes that just won’t stop talking…and we all have those classes that just won’t start talking! Such is the case with one of my second-year classes (level 1B). It’s a great group of kids, and they are very good students, but getting them to participate in discussions or speak up in general is worse than…
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High School Dropouts and Middle School
This is a fantastic video from Frontline about how a student’s middle school experience–even in sixth grade–can predict whether or not that child will drop out of high school: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/education/dropout-nation/middle-school-moment/ The video states that if a sixth-grade student in a high-poverty school is present less than 80 percent of the time, fails math or English,…
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Plan B
Today, I had to switch to Plan B. Plan B… but what’s Plan A? Plan A is personalized questions and storytelling in order to facilitate language acquisition, but sometimes Plan A just doesn’t work. This seems to be the case with my class of third-year students that I see immediately after lunch. The time slot…
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Birthday cards
Hole Punch
WL teachers are always looking for new strategies to keep kids in the target language, especially when you let them loose for communicative activities. My go-to strategy is to make sure that all students have a piece of paper in their hands (even if the activity doesn’t have a form or worksheet, have them hold…
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