Become a more confident language teacher.
Finding great resources to use with your students is one thing, but actually sharing them with your students is a whole ‘nother ball game. If you use Canvas, Schoology, Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, this blog post will be a starting point for setting up Slides/PPT and Forms assignments for your students. Example assignments in Learning…
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If you’re anything like me, you love a good manipulative activity. Here are some common manipulative activities used by language teachers: sequencing events from a story that are printed on strips of paper matching chunks of authentic texts to paraphrased summaries sorting quotes into groups based on who said or would have said each one…
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It’s January– you’re tired, they’re tired. Routines have started feeling…routine…and the same old challenges that you’ve been dealing with since the fall are starting to feel really old. Now is a particularly great time of year to be predictable in expectations but unpredictable in planning. Instead of starting the next unit or chapter and working…
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My students and I made strong, lasting connections as we co-created stories. Whether it was TPRS® (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) or OWIs (One Word Images), we had so much fun being creative together. It was through storyasking that I first experienced the power of acquisition-driven instruction. As I helped my students to understand…
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We know that we can’t communicate with someone if we don’t understand them, and we know that language acquisition cannot happen if comprehension does not occur… but just how well do we need to understand someone or something in order to communicate? How comprehensible does something have to be in order to be ‘comprehensible’? To…
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One of our family’s favorite ways to get the squiggly wiggly’s out is with Cosmic Kids Yoga. In each episode, Jamie tells a story and acts it out with yoga poses and other forms of movement (ex: jumping jacks, running in place, etc.). Our kids love the stories, love Jamie’s accent, and love yoga. Adapting…
Read MoreWhether you call them Stations or Centers, you probably love them—and so do your students. Stations give you a laissez-faire teaching day and provide lots of movement and small group interaction for students. Stations do not, however, come without challenges. Stations often take quite a bit of prep work. For the proficiency oriented, comprehension based…
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You’ve got a new comprehension-based curriculum, and you’d be 100% sold if it weren’t for that storyasking part. You’ve got a script, but what the heck do you do with it? Many teachers have asked the same question before. Storyasking is an invented word meant to differentiate creating a story from telling a story. If you’ve…
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If you’re looking for the magic resource that will make your students learn Spanish, have fun, and love your class–it doesn’t exist. But you know what does exist? YOU! YOU are the magic that will help your students learn Spanish. YOU are the magic that will allow your students to enjoy the journey. YOU can…
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Once I moved away from using the textbook as the center of my curriculum, I was free to bring in all kinds of new texts. Popular songs, novels written for language learners, picture books, short non-fiction readings prepared by me, infographics, edited stories written by my students or co-created by the class, and more. By…
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