Summertime Fun!

Original Post on July 5, 2013 on http://yhsprofe.blogspot.com 

Decided to move the original post here since the purpose of my blogging is for me to reflect personally and professionally. I don't want my thoughts to be tied to my school through the URL using YHS in the name. 

June 20th...the last day of school!!!!

I admit I was excited to begin my summer with my kids, but I was actually really looking forward to working for 4 days with my World Language colleagues on aligning our curriculum the week after school got out. I am lucky to work with 5 women who are passionate about what they teach, and always working to make it better. We sat in a room and worked really hard for 4 entire days and came out with 10 units spread across 4 levels of language. The big focus was on the "I can" learning targets and making the Interpersonal, Presentational, and Interpretive tasks meaningful and connected. We still need to work for another couple of days to get some more common units completed and we need to pay some attention to the level 5 curriculum.

Ironically enough, #langchat created #langcamp which seems to have the same idea for summertime 2013! I am super excited to explore the good things that are happening on the #langcamp page. I don't always feel like my ideas are innovative enough to share with the incredible teachers over there, but I love just learning what others are doing to maintain relevancy in their classroom while pushing their students to learn and stay interested in the language.

My summer goal for my days off (the 1-2 days a week the kids go to daycare) is to get a unit done for level 4 and work on some lesson plans that I can use when school starts again in September.

My goal for the year is to stay organized and plan my classes better. Students were pretty clear about wanting to be challenged more in the upper levels, so I think that is what it will take to make it more challenging. Pairing that with the new common curriculum will definitely be a change for the better. I look forward to having more people to collaborate with as we work through the units together in French, German and Spanish.