Become a more confident language teacher.
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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If you attended my workshop on QAR Strategies for Differentiating Questions at iFLT this past summer or its condensed counterpart at AFLA just a few weekends ago, you will be happy to see this post! If you didn’t, I hope that you will be happy to have found it once you’ve read through it. QAR (Question-Answer Relationships)…
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Pencil Grab is a super simple activity that I learned from Carmen Andrews-Sanchez via Kristin Duncan’s blog (update: her ‘TPRS Teacher’ blog is no longer active). Pencil Grab requires zero preparation, is easy to play, and it’s fun for students! Update: You may also know this activity as “The Marker Game“! What is Pencil Grab?…
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It’s a matching activity in disguise! Well, not so much in disguise as pretending to be cool. ‘Cada oveja con su pareja’ is the Spanish equivalent of ‘Birds of a feather flock together’. I’d love to hear if there is a similar expression in other languages (post them in comments, if so!). Matching activities are…
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It’s pretty easy to come up with many different ways to review portions of a story, but I’ve always had trouble thinking of unique activities that allow students to re-generate an entire text. Cynthia Hitz’s “Back At’cha” works well for this, as does creating a Class Storybook. These activities are great, because they allow the…
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