Is it possible? A board game for post-reading

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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Comprehensify your textbook readings!

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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Play “Go fish!” in language classes

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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Text Discovery

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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