reading
September 30, 2014
Three days and then…
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It’s been a rough road this summer for Cajas de cartón: a reader’s guide to the memoir by Francisco Jiménez. I think I began the guide in April or May, but then June was slammed with workshops and travel. July I lost my father and traveled some more. August I finished traveling and went back to […]
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August 28, 2014
I’ve been asked several times lately, particularly by teachers starting out their AP Spanish classes, exactly how I teach the novel La ciudad de las bestias as part of the course. Here’s the answer. If a class has higher proficiency, I set deadlines for chapters. We do read on one set day per week, but students […]
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July 9, 2014
It’s coming!
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I haven’t been blogging much lately and am dropping off the radar for about a month and I feel the need to explain why. If you’ve ever used the “Recent Popular Posts” section on the right side of the blog, you’ve probably noticed that one very not recent post stays up there. I really ought […]
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April 25, 2014
Top 25 Spanish novels
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As a Spanish speaker, I know that if I don’t use the language I get rusty in it, and as a teacher/linguist, I know that after a certain point, most of a person’s new vocabulary is acquired through reading words in context. So I enjoy reading in Spanish for the fun of it and for […]
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December 12, 2013
2103’s seventh most popular post is about one of my soapboxes, my “hills to die on.” I’m convinced that the way most of us approach vocabulary in the world language classroom is almost completely contradictory to brain research. Read on for four classroom habits that enrich student vocabulary where it counts – in their long-term […]
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December 2, 2013
When I first set out to teach the novel La ciudad de las bestias by Isabel Allende five years ago, I wrote chapter guides for each chapter as I taught it through a year. I never dreamed that teachers far and wide would use the document I made publicly available a few years ago. […]
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September 24, 2013
At a conference a few years ago -I can’t even remember which, I think it was Central States in Indianapolis- I attended a workshop by an AP teacher who gave out a worksheet she used to help students through reading authentic materials. I liked the basis of what she’d done so I took it and […]
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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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April 15, 2013
No, not the latest John Gresham to while away the class period. Whether it’s for field trips, ceremony practice, or just a widespread illness, sometimes I have a class where many of the students are gone. Inevitably this leads to the same request: a free day. For some reason, my students think that because their […]
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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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February 27, 2013
In Spanish 3 we just wrapped up a unit I reworked to continue working on students’ narration in the past, framed within understanding and talking about the news. This activity we did combines culture, interest, interpretive (reading) skills, presentational (writing), and interpersonal (speaking) skills. First, using a newspaper website or a regional/international version of […]
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August 17, 2012
2019 update: Full ebooks available As of October 2014, I made the in-depth, professionally designed ebook guide for Cajas de cartón available for sale. In the spring of 2019, the Esperanza renace guide was released. You can purchase either guide or get the guide to La ciudad de las bestias for free on my ebooks page. The ebooks improve on the […]
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