Become a more confident language teacher.
I first heard the idea for “Today in History”; or rather, “NOT Today in History” by reading a blog post from Justin Slocum Bailey on the Indwelling Language blog back in 2014. Click here to read the first post: and here to read the second. Recently, I have been looking for new kinds of ‘puzzles’ that…
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This past weekend, I had the great pleasure of attending TCI Maine, New England, and Beyond in Lewiston, Maine. This conference is one of the longest-standing conferences that provides training for comprehension based methods: it is organized by Skip & Beth Crosby and has been described as New England’s ‘best kept secret’. Contacting Skip about…
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I enjoy coming up with (or discovering) different kinds of questions to ask my students. It must be some sort of a sick teacher thing, because I can’t think of any reason that my students would be excited that a new question type popped up on their most recent assessment. I guess I like finding…
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Check out my guest post on the CI Peek blog! Follow http://www.cipeek.com to get ideas from CI teachers from around the world every Tuesday!
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I’ve been on a mission to reduce the number of emails in my “to-do” folder. This evening, it brought me to an email from about three years ago that included the French translation of the first logic puzzle that I shared on the blog. You may recall that I love, love, love doing logic puzzles,…
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In a Title 1 school on a Level 5 plan for improvement in the heat of Common Core adoption, the standards were a big part of our daily conversation. While I oppose the adoption of the CCSS, I do not deny that in and of themselves, the individual standards are worthy goals to work toward.…
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As an Alaskan, PNCFL is my ‘home’ region, but with Minneapolis just a six-hour direct flight from Anchorage, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to attend this year’s CSCTFL conference. Paired with a day spent observing Susan Block Johnson and an afternoon QAR session, it was the perfect way to spend this past week. I…
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Thanks to Samantha Uebel, who sent me French translations for my QAR materials, all of you French teachers out there can rest easy knowing that you can pop into class tomorrow and try out QAR without having to do the grunt work of translating everything for yourselves!! Yippee! Click here to download the materials in French,…
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If you attended my workshop on QAR Strategies for Differentiating Questions at iFLT this past summer or its condensed counterpart at AFLA just a few weekends ago, you will be happy to see this post! If you didn’t, I hope that you will be happy to have found it once you’ve read through it. QAR (Question-Answer Relationships)…
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“There is” or “There are” is one of the highest frequency word(s) in any language. In Spanish, the word “hay” is nearly unavoidable as we share stories with our students. Because it is difficult for students to form a mental picture for the word, however, the lack of visualization presents a challenge for getting the…
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