Fan N Pick: The possibilities are endless!

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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Quiz Quiz Trade ::with Afro-latino example question set::

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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Teaching other verb forms – a reading for Spanish 1!

I need to make an FAQ page. Here is one that came through today:     …I was looking at your website and I was curious if you teach the “nosotros” or “ustedes” forms in Spanish 1. If so, is there a certain unit in which you teach it?   Thanks!     The answer…

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Tener (“to have”) people search

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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Word Race Stories

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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Output

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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Cada oveja con su pareja

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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