I put out the call on Facebook and Twitter for some Spanish speakers. I was inspired by a call this summer for Introducciones from hispanohablantes. What an awesome, easy way to collect samples of native speakers for your students to listen to! However, I have spent many wasted hours and Read more…
This year has been a year of growth, without a doubt. After the single most successful semester of my teaching career, I decided to start from scratch on almost everything. I blame iFLT. Since I’m also on an early college schedule, I only got a week or two to process Read more…
Just flew back from Mexico, and boy are my arms tired! Must be from holding up my phone for all of those pictures and videos I took. Before I went to Peru on a Sister Cities exchange trip last year, I started a new Instagram account to document as much as Read more…
Señora! How will you get your kids to use Spanish this summer? I mean, sure, in December, they all seemed to think it was reasonable to get 4 portfolio sections completed in the calendar YEAR they were going to have between Spanish I ending and Spanish II beginning. (There are Read more…
I went the semi-scripted route for this IPA: native speakers responding to familiar-ish questions crafted with my burgeoning intermediates in mind. Basically I wanted to see how they would do with someone other than me, but without unleashing the full force of videos like those that frustrated them so in Read more…
I originally set up daily chorus bellringers based on a strategy designed to improve reading fluency. I had assumed that listening and speaking skills would naturally follow, too, and results from last year’s final IPAs suggested I may have been right…on everything but listening. Enter Gianfranco Conti and The Language Gym. Since those IPA results–and Read more…
I start the semester with passion projects. I end the semester with passion projects. It brings a sort of unity to the whole semester and gives kids a sense of relevance, of purpose for the whole studying Spanish thing. Now this does mean a little extra tap dancing on my part, Read more…
I was very happy with the personalized Genius Hour IPA last year, but I was more than a little discouraged by the overall listening performance. I know they could do better than Novice Mid! So if their abilities weren’t the problem, then what was it? It was the videos. The videos Read more…
My goal with the second IPA of a unit is to help students reflect on their final product and how they want it to turn out. Drawing inspiration from Sra. Toth and Sra. Placido’s Kiva videos, I’ve already planted the seed for students to try to convince others to carry Read more…
So you want to know how much students can interpret from a video, but you don’t have all day. EDPuzzle is cool because it lets students add voice or typed comments, but you know good and well they’re not going to understand the whole thing, and you don’t want to Read more…