September 25, 2015
¿Cómo y por qué usamos comerciales en la clase de español? Porque ofrecen cultura, una fuente auténtica para practicar la comprensión auditiva, estructuras útiles para mejorar el dominio del idioma y no son muy largos para agotar a los estudiantes con mucho contenido incomprensible. Aquí les doy las diapositivas de mi presentación para KWLA 2015. […]
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September 23, 2015
Who are the most beautiful of the beautiful? Let’s take a basic novice skill that we all have in all our curricula: I can describe someone using common adjectives. We’ve all seen and done a million activities to get students practicing description. Today, let me offer another alternative, one that offers a deep, critical-thinking aspect […]
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September 16, 2015
Meeting many of you during school visits, conferences, and workshops is one of my favorite aspects of what I do! Will I see you at any of these events this year? If not – or if so! – will I meet you at Camp Musicuentos next summer? Read on! KWLA ’15 – September 25-26, Louisville, […]
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September 7, 2015
If you’ve enjoyed using – or considered using – the taco talk to help novices and intermediates (and their parents) understand what it means to learn for proficiency, you’ll love this resource. Many thanks to Iya Nemastil, a Japanese teacher in Ohio, for taking this idea and putting it in a beautifully visualized form. I’m […]
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August 31, 2015
What items are really perking up the start of your school year? After a year’s hiatus from being in a classroom with students I can’t tell you how excited I’ve been to explore how to make this new situation (small classes of homeschooled students -ages 6 to 14- meeting with me once a week) work […]
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August 24, 2015
This might be my most important resource release this year. First, you can read here about all the things that frustrated me about that snazzy 2011 rubric that I used to use (and that got downloaded from this site a lot). Some of them probably frustrated those of you who used it, too. So I decided to […]
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August 19, 2015
Many teachers have enjoyed using the taco talk to help beginning students and their parents (and administrators!) understand what a novice-level, proficiency-based class is all about. This year I finally tweaked the document to be helpful to teachers of intermediate students. And then a French teacher contacted me for permission to change the “taco” portion […]
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What if a prominent teacher and researcher told you that you couldn’t possibly teach your students what they need to know in order to understand authentic target language and incorporate what they understand into their own language production? But don’t lose hope; Waring (and the presenter of this Black Box Videocast, Justin Slocum Bailey) helps […]
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August 13, 2015
What would homework choice look like for elementary students? I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me to ask this question earlier. I knew this year I was going to have a group of students ages 6 to 10 but I thought I’d just give them the same options sheet as my older group. Ha! […]
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August 11, 2015
As part of last year’s back-to-school posts I posted a document to get kids (and their parents) talking about tacos to explore what proficiency is and what a focus on proficiency will look like in your classroom. Since then I’ve gotten several requests to adapt that document for intermediate students. Ask and you shall receive (sometimes, […]
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August 7, 2015
Easily one of the top five topics if you look at my most popular blog posts: Choice in homework. I won’t go to deeply into what I mean by homework choice because you can see a pretty good summary here in one of the most popular posts of 2014. After you look at that, you […]
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August 3, 2015
Stressed about creating your class syllabi this year? There are a lot of really great syllabi flying around the internet. There are even competitions to see who can do the (best? most creative?) one. I have to tell you, it’s stressful. I don’t at all think it’s intended this way, but I think it feels […]
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