Become a more confident language teacher.
Something that I lovetty love love about the ability to connect with other teachers via Ye Grande Ole Internet is the way that ideas expand exponentially as they are kicked back and forth among us. Fan N Pick has long been one of my favorite Kagan Cooperative Learning structures, and I used it quite often…
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It’s no secret that I loved my past life as a self-identified ‘cooperative learning’ teacher. Thanks to the Anchorage School District and my methods teacher, I attended my fair share of Kagan strategies as a pre-service teacher and newbie public school teacher. Once I learned about Comprehensible Input from Michele Whaley, Cooperative Learning Martina retired.…
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Thank you to Beth Lemoine for translating the Monster body parts activity that I recently posted into French! She emailed it to me this evening with permission to share it on the blog. Click on the image below to access it, and click here for more about how to use it in class!
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I am in the process of doing two things: (1) sorting through old files and finding things that I’ve never posted, and (2) adding featured images to old blog posts. Because of this, you’re going to see a lot of automatic post notifications pop up on Facebook and Twitter–just know that only a few of them are…
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Being a comprehensible input teacher demands that students have opportunities to produce output. Read why here. Once we understand output is not a taboo for a TCI teacher, we can start the search for fun ways to allow students to build productive confidence and competency! “People searches” are one of the fastest, easiest, and lowest-anxiety output…
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Generate comprehensible input and provide opportunities for output from a traditional vocabulary-review game that is played with a partner! This activity makes for a great sub plan component, even when your sub doesn’t speak the target language. PREPARE THE WORD RACE STORY WORKSHEET To get started, download the game template here! Once you’ve got the…
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One common question that I was asked in my sessions at iFLT ’14 was, “I thought that our goal is to provide students with comprehensible input…so why do so many of these activities contain output?” Great question! Is output bad? No comprehension based teacher thinks that output is bad. Output is a good thing and one of the end…
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It’s a matching activity in disguise! Well, not so much in disguise as pretending to be cool. ‘Cada oveja con su pareja’ is the Spanish equivalent of ‘Birds of a feather flock together’. I’d love to hear if there is a similar expression in other languages (post them in comments, if so!). Matching activities are…
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I used this activity for the first time as an icebreaker at our MOPS group, and it was so fun! I love using it in class, because it is a great way to give everyone an opportunity to speak without eliminating teacher-guided discussion. So here’s what you do: Decide how many groups you want to…
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