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 […]
premium
March 4, 2014
I’ve gotten this question several times lately and it’s made me remember I sort of blogged on that when I wrote about taking the leap to standards-based assessment but I should go into it a little more. So, you’re ready to move to proficiency-based assessment and standards-based grading, but if you’re assessment is focused on […]
premium
March 3, 2014
I’ve released the first resource through my new resource/activities page. It’s free and it’s a package of three verb charts: present tense, sudden past (preterit), and descriptive past (imperfect). Distribute as you wish to your students; I think you and they will find it a handy resource to check verb accuracy with entire tenses in […]
premium
February 27, 2014
I love reviews as an authentic resource, especially for novices, because they hit so many proficiency targets – expressing opinions, description, talking about activities, talking about community. And they’re usually short and written with high-frequency vocabulary. So, where’s the best place to find authentic reviews? So far my favorite is a site called Loogares.com. For […]
premium
February 25, 2014
This guest post is a response to last week’s “What I hate about TPRS.” First, I would like to thank Sara-Elizabeth for writing such thought-provoking posts. You gave us a great deal to consider and challenged our thinking. THAT is always GOOD! And many thanks for the opportunity to be a guest blogger. I won’t […]
premium
February 18, 2014
A friend of mine told me he frequently gets asked if I’m a TPRS teacher. My answer: TPRS is an am vs. use question for me. Yes, I use. No, I am not “a TPRS teacher.” There are so many strategies from TPRS that have made me a much better teacher and that I use in almost every class […]
premium
February 13, 2014
What I love about TPRS
premium
Let me give you a run-down of my teaching career. After I graduated from high school, I spent four years at a liberal arts college learning a lot about what it means to be a good teacher and almost nothing about how to be a good language teacher. After graduating from college, I spent three […]
premium
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 […]
premium
February 7, 2014
How I use verb charts
premium
It occurs to me that putting resources in blog posts is all well and good, but then months pass and the blog post gets buried, and what if a teacher who just found Musicuentos needed that very resource? So, I’m about to begin releasing resources I’ve developed through a special section of the site. You’ll […]
premium
February 1, 2014
Given the blizzard of 2014 and plenty of school cancelations in the Midwest, there has been plenty of time for us teachers to be taught via movies, blogs, books, etc. During these ‘lessons,’ I noticed a common theme; people always need a leader. An old Irish poet named W.B. Yeats said that “Education is not the filling […]
premium
January 27, 2014
Last year I blogged a post about the top 3 mistakes teachers of novices make. It made a big splash, in the cyber world anyway. Something about that post resonated with teachers. But it didn’t address the biggest mistake all of us make – the cancer that plagues world language teaching and makes programs far and […]
premium
January 21, 2014
A few months ago I was at a Starbucks and picked up one of those cards to get a free app download. The app seemed to be some sort of child’s drawing tool, and since my daughter already loves DoodleBuddy, I thought, hey, it’s free, why not. Sure enough, my 4-year-old (excuse me, she’s “four […]
premium