storytelling
September 20, 2018
How do you introduce a novel? So many teacher-authors, teacher-creators, teacher-bloggers have great ideas out there for previewing a comprehensible novel with amazing activities. Just search the title of your novel and the words “introduce” or “preview.” One of those teachers is my buena amiga Maris Hawkins. I’ll be indebted to her this whole semester for […]
premium
August 30, 2018
This podcast on productivity was the last straw for me. Near the beginning, the host reminded me of the research on how much better the brain works when you not only see something written down, but you wrote it there. Sacrificing a good idea on the altar of a new idea I don’t remember when and […]
premium
October 11, 2017
We have big goals for our students. Tell me about yourself. Help us know how to get to your house. Describe a favorite park a Spanish-speaking tourist might visit. Narrate a story. That last one is my goal for my students this year. Well, it’s not even that complicated. For my middle grades learners, who are […]
premium
April 11, 2017
A Musicuentos storytelling video
premium
Over the last few years I’ve been asked several times if I have a video of storytelling in class. I never got around to making one, until now, when my good friend Wendy Farabaugh went solo and obliged the Ohio Foreign Language Association with a reprise of our 2016 session on storytelling. This year the […]
premium
March 22, 2016
I think I’ve come to the end of the acquisition vs. learning distinction for the purposes of language learning in a classroom. Rewind. When I first started investigating second language acquisition research, I was blown away by what I learned about how people really learn languages. It revolutionized my classroom. It brought me to incorporate […]
premium
March 11, 2016
In case you couldn’t tell, I love storytelling! And at Central States today I had the opportunity to talk about it with a lot of fun teachers and in particular my co-presenter Wendy Farabaugh. It’s not particularly useful for me to offer our slides as we had all of 4 of them; it was not […]
premium
August 17, 2014
In trying to tell a French teacher what I do the first day of school, I realized that my explanation of the first 12 days of Musicuentos Spanish 1 was, well, all in Spanish. So, here’s some English for you. There are so many, so very many great language learning principles, right? So much second […]
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
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
January 7, 2014
If you’ve read me long, you’ve heard it before – no matter how good the textbook is, at least in my experience, it’s never motivated students past September, and it’s out of date as soon as it’s printed. Of course there are lots of other arguments – artificial order, ridiculously expensive supplements, faulty companion assessments, […]
premium
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 […]
premium