Parent teacher conferences gave me nightmares my first year of teaching. By my third year of teaching, parent teacher conferences were my FAVORITE night every single quarter. ...

Whenever I am brainstorming how to teach a particular grammar topic or set of vocabulary, my go-to speaking activity is an info-gap activity. It's easy to set up (once you get the hang of it) and I can target whatever grammar or vocab that lesson is focusing on. ...

This tip will be quicker than the title of this blog post. Are you ready? ...

The first year is the hardest. Seriously. If you're in your first year now, just know that IT GETS BETTER . And easier. ...

I used to have a recurring nightmare every single year that it was the first day of school and I had an entire class of kids in front of me and I had no lesson plans . No PowerPoint, no papers, no supplies whatsoever. Just me and a class of kids staring at me. I had to wing it and try not to give them the impression that I'm an unprepared buffoon. ...

There are probably a billion different ways to create long-range plans. I have found them to be indispensable when it comes to lesson planning. It takes some time to sit down and plan things out, but it's well worth it in the long run. Here's how I make mine. 👇 ...

Do you have the next 6 spring break and summer break vacation spots planned yet? Better get on it! Lucky for you, I'm here to help you out with travel ideas. This is why we're friends, obviously. You're welcome. ...

If you have finished the curriculum and there are still a couple days of school left - congrats! You made it through everything! But now what? ...

I love sticky notes. I make lists of things I n eed to do on them all the time. (Doe s it even count as completing a task if you don't get to cross it off a list?) ...

A classroom full of students with too much free time is the stuff nightmares are made of. If you're done with all the work you had planned for today and there's still more than 5 seconds until the bell rings, then you can whip up this game out of thin air and pretend it was your plan all along. ...

I don't like data. Do I look like a math teacher???!!! My first year of teaching my admin and mentor teacher tried to tell me I had to have an exit ticket every day and at the end of every period I had to examine the data to see how many kids got the lesson, how many were shaky, and how many were lost.  ...

If you've got 10 minutes left of class time and you need another activity to fill time until the bell rings - charades could be what you're looking for. It takes almost zero prep beforehand , so you can easily make it look like you had this plan ned the whole tim e, and definitely intended to end the lesson with charades. ...

If your students have ants in their pants and you want an activity where they can get up, but have a purpose and reinforce Spanish - this is the activity for you! There is also a digital version if your classroom is currently virtual or if your students are 1:1 with devices 😄 Oh, and it can be used with just about any grammar or vocabulary topic. So it's an easy activity that you can use over and over again for each unit. Yaaaasssssss. ...

I inherited a class set of student white boards (about the size of a piece of paper) in my first teaching position and it was The 👏 Best 👏 Thing 👏 Ever 👏.  ...

Lesson planning can be a MONSTER. It's this continual chore and sometimes I have felt like I'm barely ahead. And that's stressful! ...

Have you ever looked at your calendar and realized - wholly crap the midterm is 3 weeks away and I still have 6 weeks worth of material to teach! I know I've been there. #firstyearteacherproblems #andsecondyeartoo I have some tips to help you out in this moment of crisis and to help you avoid it in the future!...

Every year I look forward to some lessons more than the others that I teach. But there's one in particular that I looooooove teaching. It's my FAVORITE day of the school year because I love teaching this lesson so much....

This is my last blog post about traveling abroad with students. The first post focuses on why you should take a trip abroad with students ( HERE ), the second focuses on how to plan a trip ( HERE ), the third focuses on what to plan for before the trip ( HERE ), and this final post focuses on what to plan for once you get to your destination.  This post is basically what I learned through experience, having taken teenagers abroad....

This is my third blog post about traveling abroad with students. The first two focused on why you should plan a trip abroad with students and how to plan the trip. This blog post focuses on what you should plan for before you get to the airport. The first part "Why you should take students abroad" is  HERE  and the second part "How to plan for taking students abroad" is  HERE . ...

This is Part 2 of my 4-part series on traveling abroad with students. Part 1  focuses on why you should take a trip abroad with students, and if you are reading this hopefully you are already sold on the idea.  ...

This is Part 1 of my 4-part series on traveling abroad with students.  I went to Italy with 5 students in 2014 and to Spain with 11 students, 2 parents, and a teacher-friend in 2015. Both experiences were absolutely amazing and I want to encourage many more teachers to go abroad with students!  You don't have to be a foreign language teacher - one of the other teachers I traveled with in Italy was an art teacher.  Also, I don't even speak Italian, so you don't have to go to a country whose language you already speak....