About Me

Rosalyn Rhodes is currently a Spanish teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina. She holds a Bachelors in Spanish from UNC-Greensboro and a Masters in Teaching K-12 Foreign Language from UNC-Charlotte. She has traveled and led student groups in Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. In her thirteen years of teaching, Ms. Rhodes has taught every grade level K-12, and has worked in both public and independent schools. In her professional career in Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools, she served as the WL New Teacher Coordinator and WL Master Teacher, writes curriculum, and presented a variety of professional development workshops. A member of both ACTFL and FLANC, her 2014 and 2016 FLANC presentations earned top 10 status, and Ms. Rhodes was named the 2015 FLANC Teacher of the Year. She loves teaching Novice learners and states that her goal with her students is to “open their eyes to new people and new places, and to equip them with the language skills necessary for their own cultural journey.”

Rediscovering Language Learning
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Rediscovering Language Learning

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, […]

Get in the Game: Let’s Talk About Stations
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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. […]

A Foldable City
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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 […]