As I mentioned in my very first blog post, my job description has changed from middle school Spanish (where I’ve been happily teaching the Spanish I curriculum in NC for 6 years) to K-8 Spanish.  There is no provided curriculum.  No textbooks.  No end of year assessment.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the freedom.  I don’t do well with someone else scripting me, and I have strong opinions about what’s important for language learners.  I took a careers survey a few months ago that ranked your values in the workplace.  I had assumed my #1 would be working for social justice and equality, but was surprised that there was a first-place tie between autonomy and creativity.  So, survey says I should be thrilled about such an open-ended challenge.  But it’s sort of scary, too.  I have very little experience with small children.  What experience I do have with them is not positive.  I am at a loss as to how to teach them.

I won’t use every resource I tag over the summer in my classrooms next year, but it’s been wonderful to be awarded some time to really sit down and look at what’s on the web, what other teachers in other states are doing, and decide what’s best to incorporate for my students.

Luckily, my Kenan fellowship consists of perusing the web for quality resources for elementary Spanish.  To be honest, I am a huge procrastinator (just like a middle school kid) and would not have spent so much time looking at lessons over the summer if I weren’t doing so through this fellowship.  So, for me, it’s forced planning, which is great.  Also, the resources (plans, assessments, web activities) that I’m choosing are out of my comfort zone.

I’m a no-nonsense gal in class.  I have great faith in my students’ abilities and require much from them, including several rigorous projects, but I don’t have a lot of frills.  So, when I see lesson plans that have singing or puppets, I cringe.  But in using the Open Educational Resource rubric that I’ve been trained on through DPI, I have to view resources more objectively.  I might cringe at the puppets, but for a young language learner with little to go on, the puppets are what makes the lesson able to hit so many standards and allow those students to think through more varied scenarios (for example, third person language as opposed to just first person) than a lesson without them.