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…
Real world application: Spanish I coming in handy for my son’s 5thbirthday party I have become the Spanish teacher that lets her class make piñatas. We spend a total of nearly two weeks on them. I should be ashamed, shouldn’t I? But what if I told you that this mini-project Read more…
“I’ll be honest, I don’t see much point in him learning Spanish,” Incredulous Parent said to me about halfway through our conversation. We had established that Incredulous Jr. was overall doing well, of course with the usual teenage ups and downs along the way, and Incredulous Sr. seemed to be Read more…
One of last year’s more memorable Spanish 1 lessons involved blindfolding students and making them touch slimy things. We are preparing for a bake sale so we can ship the supplies we collected for La Laja in Colombia (hopefully, along with some video cameras to share messages between our students Read more…
I cannot handle a class of 25 freshmen after 1:00. OK, 22 freshmen and a couple of sophomores and juniors. I haven’t had a class over 22 in over 3 years so, yes, I’m spoiled. And to pile all of those kids I’ve never met into one class at the Read more…
I always assumed that using a Spanish-English dictionary was sort of an intuitive exercise. However, if you see “Ella be muy bonita” or “Mi amigo es muy fresco” enough, you start to remember what happens when you assume. I modified my vocabulary techniques for Spanish I’s introduction to geographical terms. We still made Read more…
The truth is that only one student was terribly misjudged by his classmates. In fact, most were so accurately labeled that all they could do was say yes (hooray for repetition!) It went down like this: Last week, we selected activities (verb) vocabulary first through brainstorming, then categorizing, then a Read more…
Bilingual “Plátiza”Chalk talk = plática de tiza = plátiza “Chalk talks” are a classic method of instruction at my school. I don’t know where they came from, and they are probably classic elsewhere too, but I believe I have taken it to a new level–a bilingual level. Furthermore, it was the Read more…
I aspire to make my TPR as good as Lara’s one day, but I was confused by what she’d told me versus what I saw. She said that she made the gestures up with the kids, but then demonstrated gestures she’d already made up. I think I like that better, Read more…