Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell
July 13, 2012
Songs for ‘duele’
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Using the phrase me duele is an important part of any health unit, which usually consists of exercises intended to help students explain how they’re feeling. I’ve seen a lot of assessments that involve being able to go to a doctor and talk to him about what’s wrong. With that in mind, here are five great […]
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July 9, 2012
The Case for Commands
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Earlier this year when I went to the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, I attended some helpful, creative sessions by some very knowledgeable and effective language teachers and leaders. One of them was about proficiency goals and was given by the director of world languages of a large school district. I […]
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July 5, 2012
Got idioms?
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If you’ve taught language for any length of time, you know that the more students map their English onto their second language, the more garbled their production can get, and the more frustrated everyone involved can get. They think they can do a lot because they’re spouting a lot of words, but the way the […]
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July 3, 2012
If you like Musicuentos, like the Musicuentos Facebook page. You’ll get updates on blog posts and be able to start and join in on discussions related to world language teaching and learning. Join the conversation now!
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July 2, 2012
When people ask me what I do, and I tell them, I always get an interesting response. After all, I suppose I am in kind of a unique situation – my primary responsibility is Spanish department head and Spanish teacher for advanced electives, but I do spend quite a few minutes a week teaching my […]
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June 27, 2012
5…4…3…2…1… LAUNCH!
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And here we go! Welcome to musicuentos.com, the brand new home of my blog, formerly at musicuentos.blogspot.com. After four years of blogging with blogspot, why the move? Well, for one thing, it was just time for a change, and I’d been thinking about and talking about how to change and improve my blog […]
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March 26, 2012
Another change: Survey says…
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The “I CAN” goals in elementary are going well, so it’s time to keep up the lessons learned from Central States and change something else. One session I went to (a best-of-some-state) was about designing an entire year’s curriculum around a theme. This teacher planned her whole year around the idea that her class was […]
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March 19, 2012
Design your own final exam
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This year as I contemplated my final exam for Spanish 3, I didn’t want to do what they did last year, because I like the PhotoPeach reflection much better as a relaxing ending to AP Spanish. Since my most popular blog post ever is about student choice in homework, I thought, why not the final exam […]
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March 12, 2012
What I’m changing this week
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I just got back from the Central States conference, and although I only attended five sessions, as usual my mind is spinning with all the things I need to change (which would be why I only attended five sessions!). At the conference, I concentrated somewhat on elementary-related issues, since that is where I struggle the […]
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March 10, 2012
I just finished presenting my Best of Kentucky session, Target [Language]: Say Less, Expect More at the Central States Conference. Thanks so much to the few who stuck it out to attend the last session of the last day! Here’s a repost of my presentation for them and anyone who wants it: Target [Language]: Expect […]
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February 3, 2012
A storytelling success story
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In honor of last night’s #langchat topic, I want to share something that happened in one of my kindergarten classes this week. At my school, we have mandatory Spanish from age 3 in preschool through 10th grade. Until 2nd grade, however, students only receive between 15 and 20 minutes of instruction per week. I’ve been […]
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January 27, 2012
Last year I didn’t go to ACTFL because my proposal wasn’t accepted and I didn’t get to score AP exams to be able to fund the trip. This year I knew I wasn’t even going to try to go, but the reason is much happier. I’ll let Zoe tell you:So, here we go again! :)The […]
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