Become a more confident language teacher.
“Write and Discuss” is one of the core strategies in a comprehension-based teacher’s bag of tricks. It is easy-peasy and adaptable for many uses! In this post, I’m sharing with you a demo of Write and Discuss along with step-by-step instructions so that you can feel confident making this power-packed strategy your own! An abbreviated version…
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I recently read about the Draw 1-2-3 activity on the Latin Best Practices blog, and I am obsessed! Bob Patrick shared the idea, and I love that it is very simple and can be used to move students from comprehension to expression with no stress. Here’s how you do it! Step 1: Students interpret a…
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If you’ve done any number of timed free writes with your students, you have probably identified one or two students that consistently experience “writer’s block”. You know that they know some language and are certainly capable of writing in the target language on demand, but for distraction or lack of motivation, they turn in papers with…
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Generate comprehensible input and provide opportunities for output from a traditional vocabulary-review game that is played with a partner! This activity makes for a great sub plan component, even when your sub doesn’t speak the target language. PREPARE THE WORD RACE STORY WORKSHEET To get started, download the game template here! Once you’ve got the…
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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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My sister in law is a lot trendier than I am. She finds nifty projects on Pinterest all the time and actually does them. Who does that? Last Christmas, she introduced me to Smash Books. She had recently moved to Maryland to take a job teaching English, and she was showing me the beginnings of her Smash Book…
Read MoreI have just stumbled upon the most wonderful way to get your students writing without having to produce any output at all! They can write with INPUT! Crazy, right? How to do it? BLACKOUT POEMS! They are great! Simply take a text in the target language (a newspaper article, a story…anything) and hand it to…
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Free Writing is common component in TPRS®/CI classrooms. Many teachers do weekly, timed free writes; others are less consistent, but you will be hard pressed to find a trained TPRS®/CI teacher that doesn’t use them at all. As with anything, though, we like to keep our students guessing, don’t we?! More than that–we need to keep them…
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I’ve been working on compiling some ideas for creative book reports/story re-tell props/presentations. One idea that I came across are tissue box book reports (see Joy in the Journey for an example). I also stumbled upon some awesome pictures of tissue box monsters and other fun tissue box creations, but I didn’t see anyone that…
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One thing that Michele Whaley has taught me is to look to ALL content areas for inspiration. SIXES is a game that I learned from a math teacher, and it translates easily into a language classroom (get it? translates? ;-)). Overview of Sixes In Sixes, students are racing against peers in their group to be…
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