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.