Ending the year with Best of & Book Club

I just looked at the calendar and realized it’s December.

How did that happen?  And how did I forget the best-of-year posts and the book club and my December BLOGCATION?

Ah. Anyway. The great best-of posts by Laura and Allison have finally sunk in to remind me what I do in December and here it begins.

Best of: The top 5 of 2015

Since I let 10 days of December slip by without remembering to inundate your inbox, I’ll skip that part and just do the top 5.  This year, I’m humbled and honored by the almost 40,000 individual users who decided to stop by the site.  I am fueled by a desire to explore better ways to reach language learners and inspire a lifelong language learning journey, and I love sharing that exploration with you all.

As for content, August was when I apparently was ruminating on what you wanted to hear.  You’d been waiting to see my updated rubric (and my thoughts on why the old one had to change), my must-haves in a syllabus, and my choice system finally adapted for novice learners.  Throw in some activities with an awesome new song, and that rounds out the top 5.  Watch for those to be reposted this month.

Book Club: Making it stick and all the fluff in one post

I truly enjoy reflecting over the material I read and had some fun doing that in public here last year, but it was a whole lot of book review posts on a blog about language teaching.  So this year, I still want to tell you what I thought about the boys, boats, babies, and bullets, as well as radios, paintings, and the Pirate apocalypse, but I’ll limit that to one post in the month.  I’ll dedicate another post itself to the professional development book I read this year, Make It Stick.

A look ahead

I’m looking forward to sharing 2016 with you as well.  I may take some time off my outside responsibilities as I continually struggle with conflicting priorities among my passions and the important people in my life.  But here’s what you can likely count on seeing on Musicuentos in 2016:

• My own contemplation and position statement on target language use in the classroom
• More Black Box videocasts
• More embedded listening resources
• More elementary book adaptations with video
  AND…..
• Camp Musicuentos registration opening in February
  -WITH a new Camp Musicuentos site likely in either Rock Hill, SC or near Raleigh, NC AND…
  -a totally NEW FORMAT and an extra day of CM in Louisville and the Southeast to reflect teachers’ requests for more help with daily lesson planning and providing comprehensible input (in particular with storytelling and authentic resources).
• A total overhaul of the website
  – I have been contemplating the new Musicuentos website for quite some time, knowing that I needed a more responsive site with updated and easier navigation. However, I hate most responsive themes because I almost always view blogs on my computer and responsive themes eliminate a lot of my favorite functionality in the name of mobile adaptation.  I think I’ve found us a compromise and once we all get over the shock of the change, I hope you find it helpful.

See you in 2016!