Become a more confident language teacher.
Apparently I am on a reading game kick. Like I said a few days ago, I’ve been reading La hija del Sastre by Carrie Toth and Carol Gaab. I am in love with this novel. (I am also in love with La Calaca Alegre…maybe I am just in love with anything that Carrie Toth writes!) THIS…
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I’ve seen a lot of posts recently by teachers that are teaching novels for their classes and feeling like it is not going well. In many ways, teaching a novel as a unit is easy: most publishing companies have provided very complete Teacher’s Guides for their novels, and a teacher simply needs to use the resources…
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Volleyball translation is a go-to activity for many teachers that have been to TPRS workshops. Essentially, students pair up and take turns reading and translating a text, helping each other when they get stuck on a word. It is an excellent activity for students and the teacher alike to check and confirm students’ comprehension of a text,…
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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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