I may have gotten a little carried away pinning in Portuguese: I now have over 150 Portuguese pins on recycled art on my Reciclagem board. Some of them are just fun to look at, but some I can see myself actually doing. What’s more is I was immersed in accessible Read more…
Early in Teach Like a PIRATE, Dave Burgess asks three critical questions about the passions that drive us as teachers: content passion, professional passion, and personal passion. To be perfectly honest, I had a hard time coming up with anything remotely satisfactory for the content question: “of all of the Read more…
I had a pretty good year this year. I had a lot of freedom to experiment and ample access to resources to support the experimenting. We recently started in on some collaborative planning for next year with LangCamp, and it’s got me thinking about what has worked for me this Read more…
I already had 31 options for students to practice Spanish weekly outside of class. They requested more music, so I came up with 6 more musical options. They also requested more food, so here are some ways I’ve thought of that students can interact with Spanish language and target culture Read more…
My students had two requests for the weekly “opciones” assignment for next year: more music and more food. We’ll get to the food later, but I have a few ideas for how we can work some more Spanish music into students lives outside Spanish class. Since I stole Sra. Cottrell’s Read more…
Spanish 2 chose the topics they wanted to research for their final projects. I’ve got Mexican cults and Uruguayan drug laws, but, hey, they’re hooked. With subjects all over the proverbial–and the literal–map, it can be hard to come up with an excuse to get them talking to each other Read more…
Forty-five minutes a day, four days a week, I get to teach a class that is not a class! I will be preparing students to pass the reading and writing portions of the COMPASS test for entry and success in college courses.It is how my new school is dealing with Read more…
The first day, I’ll give students a survey to let them rate the which Driving Questions capture their interest the most on a scale of “Now that I know this is an option, I cannot enjoy class without exploring this” to “I could get into this” to “Please, I think Read more…
What if “Language Lab” was a place where students learned any language they wanted? They could go to this Language Lab take online language classes, but could get practical advice–applicable in a variety of languages–from an experienced language instructor. Said language instructor might not even speak all of the languages Read more…