Become a more confident language teacher.
Oh, yes–you read that correctly! Looking for a thrilling way to celebrate El Día de los Muertos in your Spanish classes? Why not play a round of STRIP BINGO?! It’s not what you think. Click here to read how to play the game. Once you’ve seen that it is, in fact, a completely appropriate game to…
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We had a great Alaskans for Language Acquisition (AFLA) conference last weekend in Seward! The only bummer was that Cynthia Hitz didn’t join us this year 🙁 Michele (the Alaska Language Teacher of the Year!) has already blogged about it, and you can read her post here. I have found it nearly impossible to carve…
Read MoreMy favorite session from iFLT 2014 (of the ones that I taught, anyway) was my session about planning units that introduce a set of target structures and then use them to teach a cultural topic to students. This was my favorite session because the creation of vocabulary-driven cultural units have had a greater impact on my…
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I love this idea from Jenny Robbins, a Spanish teacher that used some of my Cinco de Mayo resources to teach her students the REAL history behind the infamous holiday! After learning about the holiday in Spanish, her students took to the school sidewalks with chalk, on a mission to inform their non-Spanish student classmates about the historical…
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I’m always trying to think of new song, story, and video-based activities that I can use that don’t require me to prepare a specific worksheet or slide for that resource. Ready-to-go activities are great, because you can make class sets of the worksheet ahead of time and leave them in a file in your cabinet. When you find a resource that…
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The countdown has begun…five days until Cinco de Mayo! I love holidays because they provide us with such a great opportunity to spur our students on toward greater fluency while they sit back and think that they’re having fun!! Bwah ha ha! And to think that I once looked forward to them as “free days” for…
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Mention Cinco de Mayo around a group of Spanish teachers and you’ll probably get a few nasty glares. But why? There is much confusion about this popular celebration–beginning with the fact that it is really only popular in the United States–NOT in Mexico. Most US citizens (including your students) think that it is Mexican Independence…
Read MoreFinally! I have been meaning for years to add a comprehensible Semana Santa reading to my holidays repertoire, and I am happy to announce that I’ve finally finished it! You can download the final product here. It contains a two-level embedded reading with pre and post-reading discussion questions and comprehension questions, a MovieTalk/video activity, an…
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Did you know that children in Bolivia can live in jail with their imprisoned parents? How’s THAT for a hook?? I am slowly but surely working on filling in the blank places on my Spanish 1 curriculum map. To create my Spanish 1 curriculum, I pulled vocabulary from the novels I wanted to read at…
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