Activities
January 19, 2015
It’s always exciting for me to announce a resource release! Today on the blog and on my Teachers Pay Teachers store I’m releasing a new FREE resource as I explore developing communicative games. My students enjoyed using a Battleship game format to practice accurate repetitions of forms of ser and estar, so I decided to […]
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November 17, 2014
What would you do if you had taught high school Spanish for years and then suddenly you were given new responsibilities involving… KINDERGARTEN?! If you’re like me, your first day you’d come away thinking What are they thinking? What was I thinking? WHAT DO I DO?! Learning from the best In high school we can […]
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August 15, 2014
Keeping games communicative
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Many teachers are back in school and last night’s year-starting #langchat topic was, by a large majority vote, review techniques that get students moving forward quickly after a long break. I was sick and wasn’t able to join in the conversation but I’m going to assume that someone mentioned games. I would have! Who wouldn’t want […]
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June 19, 2014
Hello this time from Merillville, Indiana, where I’m learning with a group of teachers from that school and other schools across the region. What fun! This workshop’s focus is proficiency-based lesson planning. We can say that we’re proficiency-based teachers but where the evidence of that can really be found is in our lesson plans. Do […]
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May 7, 2014
4 ways to tweak the exit ticket
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When I first heard about the exit ticket, I thought it was a great idea. It seemed like a way to keep myself accountable to assess every student, and it seemed like a way to keep students accountable to do something to show me they’d learned what I’d taught. It also seemed like a decent […]
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April 21, 2014
Let’s play
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Learning vs. play Where did kids get the idea that school was not fun? That learning was not fun? A couple of weeks ago I was interviewing another teacher’s student for a proficiency assessment and I asked about school. He said that he liked learning but didn’t like school. Isn’t that sad? Well, maybe it’s not. I […]
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March 25, 2014
One of my most popular posts last year was how to use Marc Anthony’s Latin Grammy-winning song Vivir mi vida to stage Spanish Class Idol in a novice class. A few people have asked me directly, and the topic has been brought up enough on Edmodo, about more clear directions of how to teach the song. […]
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March 7, 2014
Recently when fabulous NC teacher Bethanie Carlson Drew (who has guest-posted on Musicuentos before) tweeted requesting recommendations for a good resource for authentic restaurant reviews, I was happy to share with her my favorite, loogares.com. Don’t be fooled by the footer credit on this activity – that’s all I did. She took my recommendation and […]
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February 8, 2014
This post from last year was a popular activity for Spanish class. Enjoy! ——— A while back, a hashtag hit the trending topics on Twitter in Mexico: #quierounnovioque. I used the program Archivist to save the tweets and export them to an Excel file. I often do this if the teaching value of a particular trending […]
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January 14, 2014
Website review: Geoguessr
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Since my fourth suggestion for a 2014 resolution was to take a step outside the textbook, here’s an easy idea that gives you a way to do that. I recently heard about the web app Geoguessr and I’ll warn you, it’s addictive. Basically, the app gives you Google Earth photos of seemingly random places in […]
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December 21, 2013
2013’s fourth most popular post is a novice-level activity suggestion using the Latin Grammy’s Song of the Year, Marc Anthony’s Voy a vivir. His performance at the Latin Grammys is sure to get everyone moving and singing to the music! —————- The most popular Latin pop song in the country has NOVICE written all over […]
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September 13, 2013
Stations: Exploring music
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In AP, one of the ways I love to build up to an oral comparison or persuasive essay, our two “test” assessments in each unit, is to explore the topic using stations. One of my spring units is called “El ritmo me mueve” and involves investigating artistic expression in many forms: art, design, music, and […]
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