I am happy to report that my French 2 students are enjoying their unit on castles as much as I had hoped they would. While I was surprised by how little background knowledge they seemed to have about medieval history, they have expressed genuine interest in the information they have learned from the readings and […]
So, we all know about best laid plans, right? I had a very detailed (and lengthily) French Food/Mealtime unit all planned out. Then it snowed, and got really cold, and snowed again, and I ended up losing three days of school. Then, the administration moved up the date that our interim progress reports were due. […]
Although I am embarrassed to admit it, I had never heard of an IPA (or IP-Yay, as one of my classes calls them) until May, 2013 when I attended a presentation by my state’s foreign language association. Because our state was including a student progress measure on our teacher evaluation system for the first time, […]
I have just enough time for a quick post before heading off to work this morning, so I thought I’d share the IPA that my French 1 students will be taking today. In this unit the students learned family vocabulary and how to describe people. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really happy with the reading I had […]
When a colleague told me that she thinks this is the hardest part of the school year, I readily agreed with her. As she said, all of the materials and lessons that we created over the summer have been implemented, and we don’t have nearly enough time to develop the ideas we have for our […]
One of the most frequent frustrations that I hear from the teachers I work with is that their students are not willing to speak the target language in class. While there are many reasons that students hesitate to speak, I have found the following practices considerably improved my students’ willingness to participate in the frequent […]
When I polled the members of my Facebook group about the types of activities they’d like me to include in the Novice housing unit I am working on, nearly all of the responders mentioned their favorite speaking tasks. Here are their favorites and a couple others that have worked well for me. How it’s prepared: […]
In my last post, I shared some examples of pre-listening activities for students at the Intermediate level. It is, of course, equally (or even more!) important to support Novice students by guiding them in activating background knowledge, engaging relevant vocabulary and providing reasons for listening. Here are a few pre-listening tasks that would be a […]
One of the most rewarding aspects of being an ACTFL presenter is learning more about language learning as I research a new topic for each proposal. This past year I decided to focus on becoming more knowledgeable about the listening process, as I hadn’t seen many sessions on this topic in the past. Did I […]
One of my many projects this year was to serve as the educational content editor, as well as a presenter, for this year’s World Language Teacher Summit. Although I have participated as a presenter in the past, this was the first year that I had the opportunity to watch every single video. I was so […]