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 […]
premium
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 […]
premium
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 […]
premium
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 […]
premium
December 17, 2015
December found us doing our first formal assessment of the semester. That is my reality this year, and I love it. We go at our own pace and make our own rules and I don’t see my students enough to warrant spending our precious class time on assessment instead of engaging ourselves with the language. […]
premium
December 4, 2015
How about an elementary rubric?
premium
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. […]
premium
August 13, 2015
What would homework choice look like for elementary students? I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me to ask this question earlier. I knew this year I was going to have a group of students ages 6 to 10 but I thought I’d just give them the same options sheet as my older group. Ha! […]
premium
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 […]
premium
February 12, 2015
What does your seating arrangement say about your classroom style? In my last post I made a side comment about how I handle seating assignments and discovered that the only time I’ve written about it on the blog was in the last bullet point in a post on increasing student TL use. How unfortunate, since […]
premium
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 […]
premium
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 […]
premium
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 […]
premium