¡Buenos días, amigos!

Who here doesn’t want to be a better teacher?! I do! I do! 

Sarah Breckley compiled a google map with pins of Comprehensible Input Teachers all over the globe! How cool is that?! You can see who’s teaching comprehensibly near you! And what’s so cool about that?! YOU CAN ASK TO OBSERVE!!  Comprehensible Input Teaching is easier caught than taught…you can read blog posts all day long, but there’s no better way to understand the philosophy and how it works than to see it LIVE. I love, love, love watching CI teachers in action and I love, love, love welcoming visitors to my classroom to watch us in action. Isn’t that the coolest thing about education? We can all be awesome teachers…it’s not like in the business world where you have to guard your industry secrets to get ahead of the competition…here in Education Land, there’s no competition! We can all be the BEST and FAVORITE teacher to our little darlings! We can teach and learn from each other, collaborate and help one another and we can all be great teachers! Check out her map! See if there’s someone nearby you can watch…and pay it forward! Add yourself to the map and show the world what you’ve got going on in your classroom!  You don’t have to be an expert, you don’t have to have years of CI experience…just a willingness to share what you’re doing and a interest in what other CI teachers are doing.

BUT…you know what is even better than (or maybe just as good as?!) observing colleagues live? Watching them online, in your PJs while you’re folding laundry on a Saturday morning. (Maybe it’s better for us introverts…maybe you extroverts would prefer to actually be there, ask questions, catch the buzz in the room) ANYWAY… you’ve heard me yammer away about Comprehensible Online and how excited I am to be a part of it this year.  The Conference officially begins March 1 and runs to April 30 but the presenters just got access to the conference as a test run, to make sure all the bugs are worked out and everything is running smoothly…and all I can say is WOW!

I’m obsessing over Lance Piantaggini’s classroom demos in Latin. I can’t get enough of them…I love watching how he starts the very beginning of the year in Latin 1, right from the start in slow, comprehensible Latin. I love how he engages with his students and gets them reading Latin right away.  He is truly a gifted teacher and I feel so lucky to learn from him (as I fold laundry, in my jammies, on this Saturday morning!). I also cracked up watching the always  hilarious Sarah Breckley as she shares how she increases student engagement and comprehension by using student actors in class with lots of tips and research sprinkled in.  I watched Kelly Ferguson’s Life Hacks: Classroom Edition which got me thinking about how I set up my classroom and some other strategic desk arrangements to try out. AND GUYS…I’ve only watched 3 sessions so far. There are over 90 session, with topics ranging from classroom management, demos, heritage speakers, elementary students, assessment, skill building….the list goes on and on! And you can even earn up to 6 graduate credits through the University of the Pacific, if you need even more incentive to participate! If you want to join the party, use the code AnneMarie19 for a $25 discount when you register, but hurry, the code expires February 28, 2019!   Hope to “see” you there!