Become a more confident language teacher.
Once I decided to teach for proficiency, I become hungry for stories–real stories, invented stories, silly stories, sad stories, unbelievable stories, scary stories…anything. Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning. ― Stephen D. Krashen, The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom If you…
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What are you most excited about using in class this coming year?? What is your plan for helping your students to better communicate in the target language? What resources, ideas, and strategies have you learned about this summer and are dying to implement? Guess what? I’ve got a recommendation— News you can use Maris Hawkins…
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This spring, we celebrated the two year anniversary of El Mundo en tus manos, the news publication that brings you simplified news stories from the Spanish speaking world! It has been a fantastic two years, and I have enjoyed curating current events from around the globe to bring you interesting and important stories that will…
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Many of us pursued a career as a Spanish teacher because at some point we became connected to a Spanish speaking culture. Maybe we were born into one, maybe we traveled, maybe we studied abroad, maybe we met a cute guy at a salsa lesson and now we’re married and have a pile of salsa-dancing…
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An 8.2 earthquake shook southern Mexico on September 7, leaving Oaxaca completely devastated. It was the strongest earthquake that Mexico had felt in 100 years. Just 12 days later–when relief efforts were still in their infancy and aftershocks continued to rock the area–a second earthquake of magnitude 7.2 struck central Mexico. The 7.1 quake occurred…
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La paz empieza conmigo. Say it! This article about today’s terrorist attack in Barcelona is written in super simple Spanish–almost entirely cognates–so that you can use it with students that just began their Spanish study. Even still, it will not be ‘highly comprehensible’ to fresh Spanish students because it is lengthy. It is up to you…
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Today and tomorrow (May 9-10, 2017) is the annual Teachers Pay Teachers sale, and I want to share with you some of my favorite teacher-authors so that you can stock up on materials from their stores!! While many of us sell complete units on TpT that we have created for our own classes, there is…
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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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News summaries in the target language are such an easy way to provide cultural, comprehensible input to your students. You can write summaries that are as simplified as your students need in order to be comprehensible to them. Inspired by Maris Hawkins, I began publishing weekly news summaries of stories from the Spanish-speaking world last spring, in Spanish, written for…
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Inspired by Maris Hawkins and feedback from all of you, I am now finding and summarizing news stories from the Spanish speaking world and publishing them every week in El mundo en tus manos. As it turns out, this project is a bit overwhelming! Good and valuable…but overwhelming– and not just because of the amount…
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