Blog

Elementary Spanish teachers, how is your school year going?  You’re a quarter of the way through! As you move through this semester with your early Spanish learners, we wanted to help you help them with our YouTube Basics Playlist.  This is something we’ve put together to help you organize your class around target-language music.  This […]

I am the curriculum specialist in charge of developing Stories here at Calico Spanish, but I am also a mom to three young kids. For the last few years, we participated in a homeschool co-op that met once a week.  At the co-op, I taught Spanish.  For my younger age group (K-4th grade), I used the […]

How do you teach children clothing words in Spanish? Well, you approach it like any other set of vocabulary – in context. – Follow us on Twitter – There’s some spirited questioning in the early language (and secondary!) field about how best to present some concepts.  Daily activities, particularly reflexive verbs, is one.  You’ll hear […]

Kids learn Spanish every day.  They learn it in elementary classrooms, in play groups, and in day cares.  They learn it with Pepe the brown dog in Stories.  But kids learn Spanish in specific ways, under specific conditions, and if those conditions aren’t met, language acquisition simply won’t happen.  That’s the science. Still, myths swirling around […]

Mentoring New World Language Teachers Teaching isn’t an easy profession.  It’s no wonder so many teachers leave in their first few years of teaching.  What if they had a solid support system, experienced teachers ready with strategies, ideas, and a sympathetic ear?  In a recent langchat, world language teachers discussed how they might be that […]

Almost every world language class has learners that span a spectrum of proficiencies and needs. Strategies teachers use to meet that variety of needs are collectively called differentiation.  In a recent #langchat, world language teachers discussed how to use differentiation in the interpretive, interpersonal, and presentational modes. – Follow the blog on Bloglovin – Defining […]

It’s a widely accepted truth at this point: children need less screen time.  This is a challenge, though, because not all screen time is created equal.  For example, I feel fairly safe saying there’s not a square inch of social media that a child needs to occupy.  In fact, as children get older, more screen time is linked […]

Across the world language teaching profession, teachers are eagerly looking for more and better ways to provide comprehensible (or better yet, comprehended) input to their learners.  They know that acquisition only happens when learners assign meaning to words and structures, and that requires comprehension.  This topic inspired the November 23 #langchat.  Let’s see what teachers […]

The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages – ACTFL – held its annual Convention and Expo in November of 2017 in Nashville, Tennessee.  Although thousands of teachers attended the conference, many more, of course, were not able to.  On #langchat before the conference, teachers gathered to discuss their expectations for the event, and […]

We recently told you about Pañuelito, a culturally authentic game for reviewing vocabulary in Spanish class.  Here we share Doña Ana. We incorporated this game into Calico Spanish Stories Level C (“I Live Here”), together with the song that inspired it. – Follow us on Twitter – – Like Calico Spanish on Facebook – The […]