Become a more confident language teacher.
After I graduated high school, the my alma mater back in CNY hired a really awesome Spanish teacher to replace one of mine that retired. My younger siblings LOVED her class, and I have saved several projects that my sister completed as a student in her class to use for inspiration for my own lessons! Well, that…
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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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About two months ago, I wrote a post explaining how second language teachers can use the Common Core Anchor Standards for Reading to give depth to their reading assessments and challenge students to think critically in the target language. Read it here. Understandably, some readers were left wondering what an assessment composed of CCSS Aligned questions…
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Scott Benedict is the king of assessment, so if you have never before pondered accurate assessment, standards-based assessment, etc., you should probably hop on over to his site, Teach for June, and spend the next few weeks there before you come back and finish reading this post. If you have already reached the conclusion that it…
Read MoreNote to the reader: this post should have been published on 2/12/13. Too many distractions!! Kristy’s recent post on #authres reminded me that it was sitting in my draft folder waiting to be published. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ I had to settle to be a passive participant in #langchat tonight.…
Read MoreIf you haven’t noticed, I’ve been trying to use more authentic listening texts lately 🙂 Well, I was, until the school year ended. While I was out on maternity leave, my awesome substitute was a native speaker from Puerto Rico. My students were overwhelmed (and discouraged) listening to her speak in Spanish, and became whiney…
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This is the culminating activity for my Solar System unit (Somos 1 Unit 26). This was the most fun activity that I’ve ever done in my Spanish classes! We used it during the last week of school because it kept the kids engaged so well. The activity was inspired by this infograph shared by @alenord. I…
Read MoreI had the most wonderful privilege of receiving further training from Susan Van Zant, who works with COREK12 and had already visited our school twice this year. Her training in the fall was most helpful to me with regard to questioning strategies, and her winter training fell while I was on maternity leave (shucks!). This…
Read MoreThis activity has several inspirations: Sarah Camblin, the French teacher at my school–her students are using this format to write about the frequency with which they do different activities in each season. Michele/Jenny and the story about waking up on the wrong side of the bed. The book “Alexander y el día terrible, horrible, espantoso,…
Read MoreBeing out of the classroom has given me fresh eyes. I’ve been looking at my students’ informal writing over the past few days and have noticed some pretty atrocious error patterns. Time for a writing workshop! Certainly not an innovative activity, but this was needed. I typed up five sentences (in English) to describe what happened…
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