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Personalizing the Path to Proficiency

SHARING MY OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCES AND IDEAS ON TEACHING LANGUAGES IN A COMPREHENSIBLE, ENGAGING, CULTURALLY RELEVANT WAY.

Latest Blog Posts

Música {and music videos} in the language classroom

by Noemí Rodríguez | Jul 15, 2014

Traditionally, music has always been a source of inspiration for world language teachers. Cultural themes, customs and rich vocabulary are useful tools within the songs created by various musicians around the world. The trick becomes how we as educators utilize this...

Literacy Strategies for the WL Classroom

by Noemí Rodríguez | Jul 11, 2014

“Picking up word meanings through reading is ten times faster than intensive vocabulary instruction.” – Stephen Krashen We all know and understand that READING is a fundamental practice to acquire vocabulary in context and understand how target structures function....

Spanish Time Capsule: A Letter to Myself

by Noemí Rodríguez | May 18, 2014

As the school year begins to wind down, an end of year project (not graded) was the "Time capsule letter". It became a reflective "end of year" task that my students enjoyed working on, as they wrote to their "future" selves in 4 years. This idea was inspired by my...

Let’s say “adiós” to conjugation charts

by Noemí Rodríguez | Mar 20, 2014

When I first began teaching, conjugation charts were part of what “I did” because I had learned Spanish grammar in a memorized way. I believed it was vital for students to copy down charts and change verbs from here to there, forward and backwards, practically in...

2014: The year of “Why Not?”

by Noemí Rodríguez | Jan 9, 2014

2014 has begun and New Years Resolutions are all around us! However, have you taken a few minutes to reflect on your "educational" resolution? For this year, I plan to embrace the philosophy of "Why not?" and hope you will as well. Ultimately, how do you know if that...

Tips on how to RECHARGE your September Classroom Batteries!

by Noemí Rodríguez | Aug 8, 2013

Today has served as a reflective day after recently finishing a wonderful book titled, Teach like a Pirate by David Burgess. Recommended to me by a fellow educator and after seeing the #tlap buzz on Twitter, I dove into this book and had trouble putting it down during...