Elementary
August 27, 2019
Can novice Spanish learners understand authentic poems? That was the question asked, quite appropriately, through the Ñandutí listserv, an email list from the Center for Applied Linguistics that serves primarily educators working with elementary learners. The answers were so helpful that I wanted to share them here. First, check out the very rich list of poems […]
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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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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 5, 2016
Have you thought about adding student choice to spice up your concept of homework and increase student motivation? Have you already been using student choice in homework for years but could use a few new options or a change in assessment system? Here is my kind of prerequisite annual post on options for homework choice. […]
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January 19, 2016
Where is the magic intersection of great children’s literature and stories particularly helpful for early language acquisition? I’ve spent a lot of time investigating my answers to this question and I hope my choices and the adaptations I offer here are helpful to you, whether you teach the young or the old who will tolerate […]
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December 4, 2015
How about an elementary rubric?
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It’s possible a good rubric for communicating performance-towards-proficiency for early language learners exists, but if it does, I haven’t seen it. (If you have, please share in a comment!) See this post for my update from this past summer on my more complex rubric designed to be used with no younger than middle school students. […]
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March 26, 2015
This post is primarily for parents wanting to raise bilingual children and educators in elementary immersion programs, but perhaps the rest of you will find something useful here as well. I have three children that I am trying to raise bilingual in Spanish. We started out fully committed to the one-parent, one-language method, in which […]
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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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October 20, 2014
If you use children’s stories in the classroom, are those stories skilled enough to do double – or triple – duty? Piggybacking on what Helena Curtain advised, to use literature that’s deep enough to come at life and language in multiple ways, I’d like to add a couple of suggestions for books to add to […]
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June 12, 2014
It’s a busy season for Musicuentos, can you tell? I feel like I just said that. I’m breathing a huge sigh of relief as an excellent cohort of teachers and I wrapped up a year-long project to lay the groundwork for something that has not existed in entirety before: an elementary curriculum map for the […]
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November 12, 2013
I’ve been blogging for a long time, longer than most of you have been reading here, and it occurs to me someone might benefit from a repost once in a while. Here’s one from early 2009. I’ve come up with a story that in both Spanish 1 and 2 has worked really well with teaching […]
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August 26, 2013
I recently joined the Ñandu listserv, a service of Ñandutí, the Center for Applied Linguistics‘s resource center for early (K-8) language learning. As a member of the listserv I get questions and recommendations from other elementary world language teachers. (I don’t currently teach elementary levels formally, but I do a workshop for 18 months to […]
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