Comprehensibly IB

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...