Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell
September 12, 2017
As much as I love my Madhur Jaffrey cookbook, “Quick and Easy” is not exactly how I would have titled it. But this year, I’ve discovered some super tasty Indian simmer sauces at the grocery store. Whoa. Guess what? My family loves them. They gobble up chicken in simmer sauces from a jar as much as or more than […]
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September 5, 2017
My husband bought me emoji stamps for my birthday. Really, he did, because I’d put them on my Amazon wish list. Why? Because a teacher needs emoji stamps, of course! Actually, this purchase stems directly from me being a homeschooling parent. Checking my daughter’s math is on my list of favorite things to do right […]
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September 1, 2017
Can you give me a hand up on this soapbox for a minute? I’ll be here just a moment, and then we’ll move on, I promise. It’s all well and good to march for women’s rights and hold signs about men telling me what to do, but when it’s a sexy Latin man with a crazy […]
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August 29, 2017
I’m at the library a lot, and I’m a bibliophile. I especially love library books. In Spanish. For small children. Okay, so I do teach very young children at a homeschool co-op, and even more importantly, my own little ones are on a bilingual journey, but whether you teach littles, have littles, or are just […]
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August 22, 2017
Got a travel unit planned this year? (Who doesn’t?) I love travel, and I love travel units. I don’t care what statistics say about how many of our students will travel. It’s a globalized world, and they should. Getting some language skills before traveling has so many benefits. It shows the world we’re traveling in that we care […]
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August 12, 2017
Meet Marisa. She’s a really smart Spanish teacher… at a language school in Madrid. Her blog goes back several years, but it just came on my radar in the past year. It’s called “Aprendiendo español callejeando por Madrid,” y de veras, es una joya. Here in the first resource I’m sharing for #AuthresAugust I present […]
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August 5, 2017
Sound off: authentic resources or learner materials? Uau, that’s a can of worms. Most teachers I know would say that the answer is a resounding yes. That is, we use both, and we talk about it, a lot. In fact, in the same week (long ago) that I started drafting this post, Carrie Toth blogged a […]
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August 1, 2017
Why care about frequency? If you want to remember why you care about high-frequency words, try learning a new language again. You’ll remember pretty quickly. In my recent journey to acquire some basic skills in Russian, I have more or less accidentally acquired three types of words: the ones I needed to say what I needed to […]
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July 31, 2017
Welcome back! (sort of)
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What a whirlwind of a summer! In the last few months, I’ve driven a few thousand miles and flown a few thousand more. I kayaked under a full moon and listened for the “shot heard round the world.” I watched a water moccasin climb a creek bank and ate lobster before watching fireworks explode over […]
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May 29, 2017
Who still thinks that taking two to three months’ break from education is a good idea? Well, that’s a debated topic I don’t intend to get into here, but this I do know: more consistent contact with the target language can only help proficiency gains. What is it? In my case, my students have no […]
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May 22, 2017
I’m betting you hear this as much as I do: “Oh, you’re a language teacher? I wish I could speak (X). But I’m just no good at learning languages.” I’m also betting many of you have answered the way I have. It’s not about being “good” at languages. If you’ve acquired a first language, you’ve proven […]
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April 11, 2017
A Musicuentos storytelling video
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Over the last few years I’ve been asked several times if I have a video of storytelling in class. I never got around to making one, until now, when my good friend Wendy Farabaugh went solo and obliged the Ohio Foreign Language Association with a reprise of our 2016 session on storytelling. This year the […]
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