Category: Uncategorized
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Multi-genre End of Year Project, Reimagined
In my last post, I talked about my 4th quarter plans for distance learning. Essentially, I’m scaling back to just 2 weekly assignments: 3 journal entries and 1 hour of independent reading each week. Originally, the plan for 4th quarter looked quite different. You can probably relate. I intended to…
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Making it work in Tough Times: Distance Learning & Workshop
Well, this certainly isn’t the way I envisioned my first year of diving into workshop ending up. Our COVID-19 building closure came suddenly and left us scrambling to roll out distance learning quickly. We had one PD day to come together, agree on expectations and plan our next three weeks.…
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Poesía Revelada
Hi, friends. In the past 2 months, I’ve started 4 drafts, but never managed to find the time to pull everything together to finish any of them. Then, in one night, I found some time and energy, and managed to write not one but two new posts. So here’s my…
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Video book talks
A multi-purpose activity In my workshop classroom, independent reading is a non-negotiable. It is a sacred time. If I want my students to become better readers and truly develop a love of reading, I have to give them time to actually read. As the year progresses, some students start to…
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MCTLC 2019
It’s been nearly a month since I attended and presented at the Minnesota Council on the Teaching of Languages and Cultures Fall Conference. I may be biased, but I think my state puts on a pretty amazing annual conference, with wonderful hospitality, great sessions and meaningful, important focus strands. In…
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Writing Notebooks: Setup, Maintenance & Grading
One of the perks of using the workshop model is that I am using so much less paper and wasting way less time standing by the copy machine. Less worksheets is great for so many reasons: it saves money, and trees, and time, and frustration, and best of all, students…
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Conference time!
It’s been a while since my last post. As tends to happen, life got really busy and time got away from me. Then, a family member passed away in Mexico, and I became a solo parent for 10 days while my husband was out of the country. He’s on an…
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Room for grace
It’s been way too long since I’ve written a blog post. Truth be told, I haven’t done much writing at all, aside from some quick writes with my sophomores and a sample FRQ for my AP Spanish Lit students. The thing is, I’ve been struggling to stay afloat; most days…
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When Magic DOESN’T Happen
Things were off to a great start in my heritage Spanish classes. Students were reading and writing, and talking about reading and writing. They wrote beautiful letters and many finished reading their first complete book in Spanish, ever! And then, sometime in week 3, we seemed to hit a rut.…
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When Magic Happens
I’m back, and I want to tell you about what’s been happening in my new workshop world. We’re two weeks into the school year, I’ve learned all of their names (okay, I know 100% of their names about 97% of the time in my classroom. Out in the “wild” of…
Growing with Heritage Learners 