Comprehensibly IB

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

I want to take a moment and talk about comprehensible OUTput as we either start or or approach the beginning of the school year. What got me thinking about this is the fact that I am a mother to an almost two-year-old and she has a pretty good grasp of language skills (but not that good because she's two, ya know?) Her output of sentences are not perfect but they are  comprehensible. She can talk about what she sees, what she wants, doesn't want, what she has and so on but her sentences are not perfect. She often says things like "I go play friends" or "This for me!" and "I no want" but can I understand exactly what she's talking about? Absolutely! I don't sit there and say to her "No, you say 'I want to go play with my friends". And make her parrot back perfect grammar to her mom. I respond with something like "I'm so happy you want to play with friends!" and leave it at that. She also makes these errors even

I am so excited to be writing this post. I just put the finishing touches on formatting some amazing  rejoinders using my Bitmoji! Oh man do I find them hilarious. This idea sprang from my favorite Facebook PLC over at  CI Liftoff   where another teacher had used her Bitmojis to create some posters and I thought "OMG I have to do this with rejoinders!" I already had a list of great ones that I believe came from Grant Boulanger and then I asked the members of CI Liftoff to help me finish out with their students' favorites.  I just love how they turned out! They are the perfect amount of silly+visual to aid in kid's comprehension. I have grandiose plans to do passwords this year and these rejoinders will fit perfectly with that plan. Making these posters was so simple. All you have to do is go into your  settings and change the language of your phone to Spanish. (Bitmoji stickers are currently only available in French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese,

I have two more weeks before the school year starts so I am really trying to nail down my "bag of tricks" before September 3rd. One thing I have been working on this week are my Criterion D Rubric that I am going to use for timed writes. The way my class is set up, I use every other Friday for 2 specific tasks. Friday A is the Word Chunk Team Game which you can read a description of on this handout by Ben Slavic  . The Friday B will be reserved for Free Writes. For each class, they are going to have to use specific vocabulary that we have learned in their Free Writes, underlining each use so that I don't have to spend all of my time searching for the key vocabulary. Truly, most of the time, I am only going to be collecting data in terms of how many words they write. I won't use this rubric every single Free Write. It is too much. But, I will use it probably two times a quarter so that they can get that IB feedback that is required by my school and IB itself. I a

I am about to rock your world; Especially if you get flack for "not using your 1:1 technology enough" in your CI classroom. Are you ready? Quick quizzes are fast way to formatively assess your students on a daily (if you want) basis. There are other strategies that you can use, of course, but Quick Quizzes are a really great one. The one downside about doing them is that you have to grade them 😩. Most students get 100% but you still have to go through each one. And for me, that would be right around 100 quizzes every day plus all my other grading and mama ain't got time for that. The other thing about Quick Quizzes is that you are basically making the questions up on the fly, using the information from the Guided Oral Input portion of your day and students are answering true or false. Then you have to create a key as you are asking the questions which is not a big deal but this hack cuts out the need to grade AND to create a key while asking questions (something I have

In this post I am going to show you how I plan on using Tina Hargaden's Catch-up Cycle 1: Description in the first days of the 2019-2020 school year! This is from her brand new book "Stepping Stones: Beyond Year One" which just came out over the summer. This will probably be what my second day looks like, using Day 1 to get ourselves oriented for the year. First, let's talk about her daily framework which is going to be a game-changer for us CI teachers who are tired of spending countless hours getting lost in the rabbit hole of amazing tricks to get our darlings more comprehensible input. The daily framework is set up like this: Each day can have the exact same framework if you want it to. From September to May with the exception of assessment days. Every day is has the same basic principals which are Norming the class  Reading Workshop **If teaching Spanish 1, we skip over the reading workshop Guided Oral Input Scaffolded Oral Review  Shared writing  Shar

Again, if you are not a member of  CI Liftoff  on Facebook, you are missing out!

In my last post I mentioned that I took Jon Cowart's CI Classroom Management class and it was so unbelievably informative. If you have the opportunity to take it, please do!* One thing that Jon talked about was his use of a weekly packet  that he uses to help manage his classroom. It gives the students a place to draw, write new vocabulary, and do their write and discuss and exit tickets. On the link I posted, he goes into a lot of detail about how he uses this packet every day. I am going to make 500 copies at the beginning of the year and just keep them tucked away and pull them out as needed. Jon also mentioned that if a student loses their packet that they need to complete an extra assignment (I am going to use these from Martina Bex) that the student has to complete before they get another copy of the packet. I love this! Anything to keep student's responsibility high! Students will pick up this packet on Monday and then turn it in on Friday as they walk out of class

Before this gets started, if you are not a member of CI Liftoff on Facebook, you are missing out on so many great ideas and an amazingly supportive community. The amazing Tina Hargaden runs it and I just love, love, love this group!

For one word images (OWI) I like to assess our students using Criterion C: Communicating in response to spoken and/or written and/or visual text. I teach mostly 9th graders in Spanish 1 so I use the Phase 2 criteria for assessment. After a class completes their OWI, I snap a picture and save it to my Google Drive folder. I give each class their own folder and one of the subfolders is OWI. I name it whatever character it was and put the date so that I know when we completed this creation. Our school utilizes Schoology as our online platform for instruction. So when assessment time rolls around, I upload the picture to Schoology and they complete their descriptions from the image provided on their iPad. To assess the students, I go over our Criterion C rubric with them. But, for now, I give them each a copy of the Crit. C rubric and let them look over the details of what they are being assessed on. I usually give them their rubrics 3-4 days ahead of time we go over it every da

One of my favorite Comprehensible Input activities is the "One Word Image" also known as the OWI. It is an amazing way to get kids to really get involved in the language and have them quickly pick up vocabulary because it has been produced in a way that is meaningful to them. So what is an OWI? An OWI is an image that is created by input from the students. In my class, we have a class artist. This is someone who likes drawing but can also pay attention to what we are saying in class and create a really awesome doodle based on what the class comes up with. The student artist does this at the back of the class with an easel and we don't reveal the OWI until the next day (to peak anticipation!) One thing I like about OWIs is that we can target specific vocabulary if we need to. Let's use my Hour 7 Spanish 1 class for example. We created "Becky" the blue and yellow watermelon who was bigger than the Eiffel Tower. I wish I had a picture because she was

The name at the outset seems like an oxymoron. The International Baccalaureate program is so all-encompassing and complicated that I don't necessarily think it can be qualified as "Comprehensible". I need a 3-day workshop just to pin down all the acronyms; but, I digress. As I dug through the amazing resources by  Tina Hargaden , Martina Bex and  The Comprehensible Classroom ,  Mis Clases Locas  and more, I realized that I was also searching for a resource that blended Comprehensible Input with the Middle Years International Baccalaureate program and I wasn't finding what I needed. I wanted a place to help me with units and Criterions A and B and C and D and for someone to explain to me what exactly an ATL is and how I can meld it into my World Language classroom.  This goal of this blog is to meld the worlds of CI and IB into a place where resources can be found by someone who is currently using them in real time (well, I mean, I guess it's summer so perhaps in