My third graders last year learned about places in the community and how to give directions around town - so the perfect excuse to borrow the beebots from the STEM Lab!We started with learning places in the community with the game ¿Dónde está mi perro? I told the class my dog had escaped and we needed to find her. They had to guess where in the city she had ended up. It's a great low prep way to ..read more

First grade recently finished our Animals Around Us unit, culminating in students creating an Amate bark painting inspired artwork! In this unit students learned how to say which animals they liked as well as to describe their size, color, speed, and how they move. I will do a separate post where I share what I used for the bulk of the unit - introducing animal names, practicing movements ..read more

 KWLA Fall Conference was this past weekend and the theme was all about student voice! My session on how to get your students speaking more in the target language fit in perfectly. I also gave this same presentation at NNELL over the summer.  I'm hoping to write several blog posts that touch on the same topics I spoke about but in the meantime here is a link to my slides.  ..read more

Before I go back to school this year I am doing a Back to Basics series. In Part One - Introducing New Vocabulary in Spanish Class (click here to read) I discussed some basics of how to introduce new vocabulary. Once the students have heard the new language, now they need to practice it in class with different activities. Way back in 2015 I was lucky enough to attend a two day workshop with ..read more

 It's that time of the year where motivation is running low for both students and teachers! Here are a few of the things I did with my students the last two weeks of school. My main criteria was that we still had to be using Spanish, they were fun, and they weren't too complicated to set up or explain. 1. Secret Words Watercolor PaintingThis one was actually almost too much for the end of the ..read more

 Today I want to write about a simple change I made in my classroom that has been one of the most impactful - it's my graffiti board. When my smart board was replaced with my flat panel I had this white board moved over by my door. The first year I used it to hang up student work. But I realized that most kids were not looking at or interacting with the board much. I wanted something that would ..read more

 My fourth graders recently finished a unit on shopping and it was super fun! I haven't done this unit in several years because I seem to run out of time and I've focused on other things (mainly things I knew would be on the district benchmark assessment) but we revamped our district K-5 curriculum this fall and I brought this unit back with a bang!Be sure to read to the end for a FREE RESOURCE!I ..read more

In second grade we have been learning about making healthy food choices. If you follow me on Instagram you will have seen some fun activities we've been doing as wrap up this unit. In the past I have struggled somewhat with this unit because there are so many different ways to look at this. Do you use my plate from myplate.gov? But then you have to teach food groups and those aren't really high ..read more

It's that time of the year! Halloween and Dia de muertos are fast approaching. Here are some ideas and resources to get you started! 1. Build your ofrenda! This year I put mine in the hallway so that students can see it every day on their way to their specials classes. The gym teacher overheard a kid calling it the "Coco table!" I only actually teach Day of the Dead to 2nd grade since their ..read more

 A few years back my district wrote a K-5 World Language curriculum and benchmark assessments. It was great to have some direction and all the teachers were teaching the same things but it also meant that a lot of my favorite projects got the ax because they didn't fit in where they used to. One of those was my Adios Monstruo class book I used to do in second grade (read more about it here).  ..read more