Comprehensibly IB

Ahh, yes, I knew this was going to happen. School started and I put my blog by the wayside because, well, life! That being said, last night I got to meet and hang out with the real life Tina Hargaden! It was so cool, y'all. We talked about our lives and Stepping Stones and it was so awesome to meet her and spend time with her, Kaitlin Leppert at Sara Schreiner's beautiful home! It was so fun. It also reinvigorated my want to share what I have been doing in class because it reminded me that what I am doing might be valuable to others and so I want to share! Right now I am in Phase 2 of Stepping Stones and we are working on Narration. My favorite lesson so far has been about a student, when he was in kindergarten, rounded up a group of other kids and trapped a girl on top of a rock wall because she was touching everybody's butts. The students were crying laughing because it was just so ridiculous! We learned new vocabulary like rock wall  and trapped while really focus

Okay. It happened. I was JUST getting into my groove with my daily framework and Stepping Stones and my daycare lady got sick and said she couldn't watch our baby on Friday. I was already in the car on my way to pick up the babe and was in full panic mode. My mom couldn't watch her, neither could my sister and my husband had a very important grilling thing he "had to do at work" ... that's a whole different story. So it just came down to me having to take a day off and I was not ready. As I picked up the baby I was trying to come up with a game plan and remembered Mike Peto's  awesome post about creating beginner level texts with your beginners using comic strips.  So off we went and made the full loop back to school to get one of my write and discuss notebooks. This sub plan took me less than 15 minutes to complete. I opened up the editable comic strip , typed 5 days worth of write and discuss (focusing only on weather) in each of the boxes and told my su

Friday was such a fun day for me. After talking about my syllabus (for 5 minutes because it really bores me and the kids to tears but we as teachers are required to present it even though the grading policy is the same across all classes at my school) AANNYYY WAYY...  I moved on to my second language acquisition chat! I followed Tina Hargaden's YouTube video and even practiced drawing out my little figures before I presented. In the description of that video she also includes a script to help drive your SLA chat. There is a lot of great information in that script and I sort of wish I had written out bullet points that I wanted to cover because I got to the end of my little spiel and realized in each class I had forgotten something I wanted to mention. Boo! If you do haven't done your SLA chat yet, I highly recommend it. The bullet points I wish I had covered with every class were these: Being human means we want to try to connect with others and express ourselves while

Wow! My first week back just flew by. I can't believe I already have 4 days under my belt. The days went by so quickly and my stress level was surprisingly low. I am in my 6th year of teaching and I honestly feel like I am starting to get into my groove. And now that I'm using Stepping Stones by Tina Hargaden, I feel like my prep load is way lower than it ever has been and I'm loving it!! On Friday, I briefly went over my syllabus for my MYP Spanish 1 class. If you are using Stepping stones, this is how I laid out my Units of study and the Global contexts: Unit 1: Description - Describing people and setting Global Context: Identities and Relationships Grammar focus: Internal and external characteristics, preferences, personality, setting including weather and sensory details about the setting. Unit 2: Narration - Narrating personal stories Global Context: Personal and cultural expression Grammar focus: Dialogue and inner thinking Unit 3: Description within Narration Global

I made another resource to make your lives easier with quick quizzes! I wanted to create a key that I could easily mark every day for each of my classes and then have a master that I could give to my TA so that she can help me with grading. On the farthest left column, we have days of the week and across the top are the hours that I have each of my classes. After you ask your quick quiz questions (alliteration, much?) just mark on your sheet what the correct answer should be! Easy as pie. Except that phrase doesn't actually apply to me because I pie is actually quite difficult. Easy as... eating ice cream directly from the carton? Sounds good to me!  If you teach more preps than this, copy the whole table on to a second page and print double sided so that you have the whole week at a glance on one page. I hope this key is helpful for you!

My first week back to school is only 4 days long. I am looking forward to having a shorter week but I am so stoked about Stepping Stones that I am already planning what I am going to do even though I don't start until September 3rd. That's how excited I am! The first 3 days, every lesson is going to be exactly the same. We are just getting to know each other and I don't want to try and do too much too soon. Slow! Is! Key! I am saying that for you, but also for me. I have a tendency to speak to quickly and assume that more students are understanding than they really are. These are what my lesson plans for my first week of school are going to look like:  As you can see, everything is set up the same way for the first three days of school. I want my kiddos to really feel successful on those first days! I want to build their confidence. Day 4 is a Friday for me and so I am going to use that day to talk about what Second Language Acquisition looks like and how it works