There are a lot of ways to bring the school year to a close and not every way works for everyone. This year I personally feel like a soldier marching back from war and don't have the mental bandwidth for much at this point. As you can see, I haven't blogged for a minute and I really don't have time now either.

Preparing to teach Víctor Erice’s 1973 masterpiece, El espíritu de la colmena, can be as daunting as it is rewarding. I'm taking my students to see it thanks to Film Streams' School to Screen program and want to make sure they get the most out of the experience. I honestly hadn't heard of it before, but have been blown away by the reviews.

Picture this: your most energetic class is quiet, engaged, and acquiring language at a level you didn't think was possible. And with a little front end set up, you have zero prep for it the rest of the year. Yeah right, you think. Not MY freshmen. And how much work and planning does this take on my part? Maybe you're thinking…

This is a huge flashback for me. I remember smurfs (los pitufos en español) were all the rage when in was in 3rd grade. I used to draw them all the time for my friends and even made a poster that won 1st place at the prestigious Smurf Pancake Feed 😂. Well 40+ years later I found myself at a summer scholarship program at the University of Salamanca only to have the professor talking about smurfs!

In case you missed my previous post on tea parties, I suggest you check that out first. I had only done a tea party with my upper level students before. I wondered, "How does a tea party go with novice learners?" Well today I found out first hand! And as you can tell by the looks on my students' faces, the answer is pretty darn swimmingly!

A tea party is an interactive experience and the perfect way to hook your students on any novel, show or story that has several characters before beginning to read (or watch) it. I first learned about doing a tea party from Rita Barrett at AATSP and was charmed off the bat, as I'm sure you will be too! I would be much better letting you read about it from Rita herself in this guest appearance on Sra.

If you're like me, you do informal assessing all the time, but the formal not so much. Students respond chorally in Spanish, interact in pairs and small groups, but seldom get that one on one attention and feedback in a large class setting. My Spanish 2 classes are usually 30 kids, and even one of my IB Spanish classes had 30 last year.

This is the second post I'm making about an AI tool for writing proficiency feedback. If you didn't get a chance to read my post on Class Companion yet, you can read it here. Brisk teaching is a Google Chrome extension that requires that you give it permission to access your Google Drive. Once you have installed it, a little icon will appear on your screen any time you have a document open that you can use it with.

I feel like I had a very successful first day of school today and would like to give you a glimpse of my Spanish 2 and IB classes on day 1. Spanish 2 I began with some Latin pop/reggaetón music playing as they students entered. I greeted them at the door with a nonthreatening "hola" and a smile Using slide 1…

Whether you’ve dipped your toes in or jumped all the way into teaching with a focus on comprehensible input, you’ve surely realized that it is a decisive paradigm shift for students. They are not learning about the language you’re teaching, rather they’re learning about other things using the language. Focusing on the messages themselves as a means to learning that language, instead of the language itself, can be counterintuitive.