Become a more confident language teacher.
Most of our readers are now on summer vacation, and we hope that you are taking your vacation seriously– whatever that looks like to you. Splash in rivers, get your hands dirty in your garden, sip icy cold beverages, play with your pets and your kids, veg out on the couch, clean out your closets……
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Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS®) is a method for teaching language in which the teacher and students co-create stories. While some teachers prefer to create stories from scratch, many others have found it helpful to have a starting point–a script– and there are many scripts available to language teachers. Every script is an…
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IT’S TEACHER APPRECIATION WEEK! …and almost time for TeachersPayTeachers’ annual Teacher Appreciation Sale. The Comprehensible Classroom is IN! On May 4-5, teachers can save up to 25% on EVERY product that we sell: lesson plans, curriculum bundles, digital resources… everything! Knowing that you can get a deal NOW can sometimes leave to frantic shopping. With…
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As language teachers begin to consider implementing Standards Based Grading, a question quickly arises: what standards should I be grading? Typically, Standards Based Grading in language classes means basing student grades on their interpretive, presentational, and possibly interpersonal performance on summative assessments. Students complete interpretive reading and listening tasks and presentational writing and/or speaking tasks,…
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When a teacher is working alone to figure out how to grade students’ work in reference to a standards-based rubric, it can feel very daunting. It is hard to feel confident that you are making sound determinations when you are looking only at pieces of evidence produced by your own students. For that reason, teachers…
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An Annotation Walk is a simple reading activity that will help learners process and connect with a text and provide them with an opportunity to move around the room and maintain a safe distance between classmates. Meghan Loveless, who is a teacher in Colorado, designed this activity to get more mileage out of Annotation activity…
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In language classes, we believe that midterms and finals should be easy for teachers and easy for students. But before I tell you why, let me tell you a little story. The First Year Teacher and the Semester Final Once upon a time, there was a middle school Spanish teacher. It was her first year…
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Each year, I wait with great anticipation to see what story the National Lottery Commission will share through their annual anuncio for the National Spanish Christmas Lottery. These stories, told in short films, are a great teaching tool to use in class to promote a spirit of generosity and community among our students. Over the…
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If you’re a language teacher, I am willing to bet that you have played the Flyswatter game with your students! The Flyswatter game, commonly called Matamoscas in Spanish, is an easy game that brings in movement and competition. It’s also easy to keep it Comprehension-focused, as Keith Toda taught us some years ago. But is…
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I grew up in New York. As I began traveling to faraway lands, I’d answer the question, “Where are you from?” with “The US, New York!”. The reaction from the listener almost always had something to do with the Yankees, or Broadway, or Times Square, or simply an exclamation of how exciting that must be.…
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