Become a more confident language teacher.
When I wrote the Teacher’s Guide for Brandon Brown versus Yucatán, I included a unique during-reading activity for each chapter. I did this because when you are reading a book in one fell swoop and using it as the basis for your class activities for a chunk of several weeks (or longer), you have to…
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I found this activity several years ago on Lessonstreams.org, and it has been a staple in my during-reading activities rotation. Because novels are an important part of my Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 curricula, we do a lot of reading in class! I’m always on the prowl for new activities that I can use while reading to…
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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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Katie Sevilla just sent me an email describing an awesome twist that she made to the Sound Effects Read-Aloud activity that I described in this post. Before beginning Chapter 1 of Esperanza, she had her students audition to be the student that provided each of the sound effects during the reading! I love this idea so much! She…
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Instead of playing with a deck of cards, play this familiar children’s game with original cards filled with images or text as an opportunity to to get students speaking in low-risk situation even as they continue interacting with a text (’cause it’s all about the input, baby!). Before you play Go Fish Prepare students for…
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Waaaaay back when I was a baby language teacher, I attended a writing workshop for world language teachers here in Anchorage. Dr. Amy Wright, then-professor at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks walked us through a powerful strategy to personalize and break down a complex text. In Dr. Wright’s workshop, we worked with an excerpt from La…
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We had a small but fruitful First Second Friday meeting last night. For those of you that don’t know, Michele Whaley organized a group back in 2010 that meets once a month to discuss and practice anything and everything that might be of interest to World Language teachers. The April 2014 issue of The Language Educator featured…
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Freeze Frame is a fun, interactive way to review a story by assigning to students to groups that create physical depictions of scenes from a story (short film, class story, novel, etc.) in ‘freeze frame’ vignettes. If you’ve been to a TPRS training in the last few years, it’s likely that you are familiar with the…
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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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