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 [...]
An expanded version of this lesson is available here. This is an activity that can be done as a follow-up to a short story between week 2 and 3 of a Spanish 1 class. The Bell Ringer/Do Now assignment, called the Repasito, is displayed below. In the example, the Repasito [...]
A reader of this blog asks: I'm curious to know, do you have a criterion or standard of what grammar should be included in level 1, level 2, level 3 and level 4 books? Our general standards for grammar follow the levels in a traditional grammar syllabus with a [...]
Numbers Brain Breaks World language students often need help with numbers. Numbers are useful, but they are abstract and many are not high frequency, plus teachers do not always incorporate numbers into lessons. So students begin to forget them. I hate it when level 2, or even 3, students [...]
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 is the perfect unit for when the teacher is out of the classroom for a few days: It delivers comprehensible input, it gives students a concrete task, it is multi-level, and the accountability is built in. Plus, the sub doesn't need to know the language or how to [...]