I love what I do. I love Spanish, and teaching, and I love watching students “get it”. I also love presenting, and how I have a platform to share my journey with other teachers, but y’all, teacher burnout is a real thing. Last year was a crazy year for me, and after my SCOLT presentation, …
Author Archives: Rosalyn Rhodes
Get in the Game: Let’s Talk About Stations
Hello, and Happy Spring! I just got back from the SCOLT conference for the 2nd time ever, and this time I got to present! So this post, fair warning, is going to be partly about my process of submitting and doing a presentation, and the other part about the actual stations presentation as it happened. …
Continue reading “Get in the Game: Let’s Talk About Stations”
A Foldable City
So it’s not a surprise to anyone that I am a super fan of foldables, but I’ve realized that Twitter is not really the place to try to explain how to make and use them, so here we go. Some of them are really complicated (the secret door foldable), but this one is really basic, …
Telling (Childhood) Stories
I’ve been struggling hardcore with my one of my classes recently. They’re an upper-level class, and I feel like we’re doing the same style of thing every day, or most days at least. Their interest in conversation and authentic resources and real-life issues is not really that high, and I’m at the point where I …
Conversation on the fly
So lots of people have asked me about this post I made on Twitter about speaking circles, and I can explain it better here than in Tweets. Best day! Whole-class speaking circle but w/ teams, new topic every 8 min, TL earns pts for team, Eng loses pts, top team & Indiv get prizes — …
Change is Hard
I have been trying to write a post for over a month, and nothing has been working. I’ve been struggling with writing, deleting, thinking “this sounds ridiculous”, etc, so I’ve written nothing. Tweets don’t count, although, I’ve at least been doing that a bit. As I’ve thought about it, I think what the problem is …
Surviving EPIC Failure
This post is not shiny or flashy with great pictures of my kids engaged and working on creative, fun, or culturally relevant tasks. This is a reflection on a week that ended with crying and an unhealthy amount of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. This was my week of EPIC failure, and I feel …
Fashion Forward
Last year I did an introductory vocab lesson about clothing that had high-energy, engaging, and competitive activities, and lots of Spanish. What it definitely lacked was ANYTHING related to culture, authentic resources, or real people doing real things. The lesson was fun, but as I try to improve what I do in the classroom, I …
Solving the Note Taking Puzzle
So, here’s the thing that was happening in my classroom, and it has been making me crazy. I am fighting every day to be the most engaging and interesting thing in the room so that my students will pay attention to me and learn Spanish. I am speaking in the target language 90+% of the …
Grammar and the Airport
Here is the continuing saga of the travel unit…as promised. Would you like to jump into my classroom experience for a moment? “Sra. Rhodes, I’ve never even been to an airport…how am I supposed to know what happens there?” So….The students have to learn all the different places in the airport, the people they need …