Become a more confident language teacher.
Celebrating student success is a huge contributor to creating a positive classroom culture. Traditionally, teachers have used many different kinds of reward systems and incentives to motivate and celebrate students. Often, these systems have unintended and problematic consequences. This is something that I am aware of and working to minimize! In this post, I’ll share…
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This is a great song that I found on Señor Jordan’s blog. It is excellent practice for the structures “tengo” and “vale más que”. Below are some basic lesson plans; you can purchase a much more complete lesson plan bundle that includes readings, slideshows, and additional activities and assessments here. Here is the lyrics and activities…
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This game will take you two days to play. It is designed to practice the structures “I/you have” and “is worth more than”. Day One – Explain rules and give out paperclips: Give each student a paper clip (or some other small, meaningless object). Tell them that their homework is to “Trade Up”. They need…
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Many very intelligent people have said that it is important to administer a variety of assessment types for each skill set. This will give you a deeper, more meaningful understanding of your students’ proficiency in that skill area. For some speaking assessment ideas, please see this post! Regardless of which speaking assessment you choose to…
Read MoreBiography.com has a nice variety of fairly short biographies (written in English) of twelve different people from Spanish-speaking countries. For a writing activity, I had my students choose two and summarize them in Spanish. My directions were to include Where and when the person was born Where s/he lives (or lived) Something about his/her personal…
Read MoreIn every room of our school, we have “Power Writing” posters. These are posters that give students a formula to write a complete paragraph. Since I support my school’s literacy schools in every way possible, I encourage my students to use this formula to write great paragraphs in Spanish, just as they would in English.…
Read MoreThe Alaskans For Language Acquisition Conference was last weekend, and we were blessed to host five incredible speakers for the weekend (Carol Gaab, Terry Waltz, Laura Terrill, Hiroko Kataoka, and Uwe Kind). I spent much of my time in the sessions presented by Carol Gaab, president of TPRS Publishing, Inc., as three of them focused…
Read MoreI wrote this story to introduce some of the vocabulary for Chapter 3 of Pobre Ana. TARGET STRUCTURES lo/la agarra – s/he grabs it se enoja – s/he gets angry tiene miedo – s/he is scared hacia – toward PRACTICE SENTENCES Mi hermano agarra la galleta más grande. My brother grabs the biggest cookie. Mi…
Read MoreMy students are taking longer than expected to complete an individual speaking assessment (a good thing–they are saying a lot!), so I am trying to find different kinds of activities that they can work on independently while I finish up the last few (they can only read so many different things before they get sick…
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This story comes from Carol Gaab’s free article, “The First Two Weeks”, which is available on the free downloads page of Fluency Matters. CORE VOCABULARY (nunca) cierra – (never) closes abre la puerta – opens the door son las (ocho) – it’s (eight) o’clock PRACTICE SENTENCES Ron abre la puerta de la escuela. Ron opens…
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