April 10, 2013
Songs for future tense
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If you’re working with future tense, I recommend doing so around the proficiency goal of talking about goals and dreams, one of our 3 major goals in Spanish 3. This is something high school students are asked to think about and talk about a lot, so it fits in naturally especially in junior and senior […]
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April 5, 2013
One of my top two most widely-used ideas ever is abandoning homework in favor of a weekly “fluency” activity involving a whole lot of student choice. [Incidentally, the other is the YouTube commercial cloze quizzes – in 2.5 years about 60 teachers have joined this project.] Basically, the concept is that instead of you assigning students […]
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April 4, 2013
300 times thank you
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This may look like an ordinary post, but it’s not. Look closer. This is what 300 blog posts looks like! Not very long ago I tweeted my 10,000th tweet: “10,000 bricks down the yellow brick road and no Oz in sight. Turns out the journey IS Oz.” Who needs an audience? I remember when I first started […]
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April 2, 2013
Reporting like kindergarten
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My daughter is in preschool and actually takes tests and gets a report card. Her tests consist of her teacher asking her to cut or draw something or identify letters or colors. When I get her “report card” it tells me whether she is satisfactorily completing a series of developmental and cognitive tasks like “counts […]
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March 30, 2013
I’ve been faced with many dilemmas this year as I inherited a Spanish 3 class with low proficiency- I mean, at least a couple of Novice High students in Spanish 3. I don’t know how or why exactly they made it through to my class with these struggles. I feel like part of it must […]
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March 26, 2013
Fun activity #9: A leer
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In 2011 I blogged about what a boring teacher I really am and how I was inspired by some conference workshops to make things more fun in the classroom. This is the ninth post on the activities that came out of those experiences: “let’s read.” The premise here is easy – when the random picker […]
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March 22, 2013
Last tips on avoiding burnout
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This is the last set of tips to avoid burning out in communicative teaching. Check out “Burning out or burning bright?,” “More tips on avoiding burnout,” “Still more tips on avoiding burnout,” and “Even more tips on avoiding burnout” for more help on how to stay sane and effective at the same time. Stop looking […]
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March 21, 2013
Cortometraje for narration
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One of our major goals for Spanish 3 is to refine narration. We believe this is a critical function of language. Teenagers do it all the time. They talk about what they did over the weekend, over the summer, yesterday in math class. They tell stories about the amazing shot at the basketball game or […]
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March 18, 2013
Developing curriculum is time consuming but worth it – unless the time it takes makes you give up on communicative teaching all together! I’ve blogged about some ways and even more ways on easing into developing curriculum. Here are two more. Tackle one unit, one class at a time. This is part of taking baby steps. If you’re […]
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March 15, 2013
This is the fourth set of tips to avoid burning out in communicative teaching. Check out “Burning out or burning bright?,” “More tips on avoiding burnout,” and “Still more tips on avoiding burnout” for more help on how to stay sane and effective at the same time. Organize your bookmarks. A few weeks ago our […]
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March 13, 2013
Authentic resource: trivia games
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¿Es verdad que Einstein ayudó a inventar la bomba atómica? ¿Cuánto sabes de true crime? ¿O el cerebro? Play these trivia games and more – or just explore other authentic content – on the Mexican branch of the Biography channel, Canal Bio, in their games section. Authentic resources like this are rich with contextualized meaningful […]
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March 8, 2013
This is the third set of tips to avoid burning out in communicative teaching. Check out “Burning out or burning bright?” and “More tips on avoiding burnout” for more help on how to stay sane and effective at the same time. Develop a strong personal learning community. I can’t handle too much social networking. I’ve […]
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