Spanish 3/4 students have started teaching the Kindergarten students Spanish. I teamed up with the Kindergarten teachers to have my students come over every other day 1 for 30 minutes of Spanish instruction. It's not a lot of time but it's a great way to instill some interest in them at a young age and it proved to be a very reflective and motivating process for my older students. Check out some of our highlights:

Day of the Dead 2014

Day of the Dead is a special and unique holiday that celebrates the dead. To learn more about how to teach/prepare for Day of the Dead check out my Day of the Dead Culture Page.

Each year my Spanish 1 students choose someone to celebrate on an Ofrenda. Their projects turned out beautifully! View them here...

El calendario

Learn about the days of the week in Spanish and how to read a calendar in Spanish at this great BBC Primary Languages website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primarylanguages/spanish/my_calendar/

Study the days of the week on this Quizlet website: http://quizlet.com/308910/spanish-days-of-the-week-flash-cards/

  

New year, more thoughts!

Two years down. It's hard to believe! As I was fully reminded of last week during our staff development this year will be full blown PLC, EE, PPG's, SLO's, ELO's...oh and PDP's. Not to mention honing in on standards, communicating more than ever with families and fine-tuning lessons.

This summer was spent reflecting on how I can better use the Wisconsin Model Academic Foreign Language Standards in my classroom. This is still a work in progress. I'd love to find a working rubric or set of I can statements if anyone is willing to share. Determining the difference between developing, transitioning, refining....hmm. ACTFL seems much more straight forward in my opinion.

I also took some time to work on this blog. Although I'm not sure on the attended audience...students, language teachers, ME...hopefully it is helpful to someone! I've added different thematic pages along the top and I've incorporated some of the Pinterest pins I've accumulated and done nothing with! Semi-solution? #theymakemeexcited #hopefullyuseful

Last year I posed the following questions which by the way ALL are still relevant!
What should I change in the curriculum? How can I incorporate more culture in the classroom? Do I continue to try to 'flip' my classroom or do I try a more blended approach? How can I hold students accountable and show their growth as a language acquirer? How do you quantify language levels? How can I incorporate what I learned about TPRS into the classroom?

To answer some of them though...
I have reworked my Spanish 3/4 curriculum to have shorter units in hopes of being able to better master material and to be able to spend more time learning how to use the language rather than just learning about it. I took some time and thought about curriculum gaps and added them into my scope and sequence where I thought they might fit in well (we'll see how that goes this year).

Culture, culture, culture...perhaps the most relevant question in some ways. I read a blog yesterday that I loved that spoke to having a specific culture day (every Thursday for example). Awesome idea however how much prep would that be? I feel like that might take a summer to prepare and not something I'd like to whip together in the heat of the moment. Perhaps someday I'll give the curriculum an overhaul and have units that are culturally focused rather than squeezing the culture in where it fits.

Hopefully with the SLO's this year and the PPG's I"ll be able to take some time to better reflect on showing growth. My first step this week was to create a student friendly self-assessment to go along with the Concordia Language Village Self Assessment. See my student friendly goal sheet here. I've had these self assessment sheets since day 1 (by the way they're free!) but I've never known how I wanted to use them. It recommends using a dry erase marker but with 120+ students that didn't seem like the right option for me. I'm excited to use the spreadsheet I've created to share with students so they can self-assess every quarter.

Taking all of that into consideration I've also set some other student focused goals for the year:
1. Create and use Quizlet flashcards for every unit
2. Uploading more student resources to my classroom website
3. Use Duolingo.com in the classroom for fast finishers
4. Use Instagram inside and outside of the classroom to engage learners
5. Get my Spanish 4 students blogging!

Here's to year three, lots of acronyms and my new obsession: Spotify Latin Playlists!

Welcome

It's that time again. School starts tomorrow and I'm stuck wondering where my summer went. I sat down last week to continue to work on lesson planning and realized I didn't know where to start. Even though it is my second year and I should feel a little more at ease there are so many ideas and possibilities floating through my head that make the whole process as nerve wracking as last year.

What should I change in the curriculum?

How can I incorporate more culture in the classroom?

Do I continue to try to 'flip' my classroom or do I try a more blended approach?

How can I hold students accountable and show their growth as a language acquirer?

How do you quantify language levels?

How can I incorporate what I learned about TPRS into the classroom?

Etc, etc, etc...

Anyhow I've decided to start a new blog (see my old blog at http://flippinginmyfirst.blogspot.com/) to organize my ideas and continue to reflect on what I'm doing inside my classroom. Last year I was focused on curriculum development and flipping my classroom. This year I'd like to focus on organizing my ideas, reflecting and implementing change based on last year and trying new teaching methods such as Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling. At this point I guess we cross our fingers, hope for the best and keep reflecting! I'll let you know how it goes! I'd love to hear from fellow teachers on their preferred lesson planning methods/templates and how they implement and remember change from one year to the next.