Teachers often ask me why I feature verbs so prominently in my training and materials for beginning students. It's because that's where the action is! And using verbs over adjectives can make for compelling storytelling. I try to follow the storytelling advice from the creators of South Park: the [...]
Another school year is almost here. Starting off the new school year is a new beginning with new opportunities... and it's always exciting! I was driving a backroad in northern Colorado the other day and came upon this scene. A forest fire had swept through this hillside a few [...]
Start your students off right by teaching them effective reading strategies with these bookmarks. Download the bookmarks here to hand out to your students. They will remind kids how to read in another language: Just keep reading. Too many language learners stop to look up every unknown word. Terrible [...]
(This is a excerpt from my book and workshop: Hi-Impact Reading Strategies: How to Accelerate Fluency and Proficiency with Reading. Get the book in hard copy here and the eBook here.) When designing your Independent Reading Program this year, consider this. An interesting experiment is described in the book [...]
It's here! I have been working on this book for a year and a half, (well, actually, my whole career). And it's finally done. This is the best of what I teach teachers. It is some of the best work I have ever written, a distillation of all my [...]
This just-published unit can be the first full story of the school year for a Spanish I class. It can be told at the beginning of the second or third week of class, or it can be saved until later. It explains how to get students reading right away. [...]