NHAWLT This Weekend

This weekend was the New Hamshire Association of World Language Teachers’ annual conference and I presented both yesterday and this morning. I don’t teach in New Hampshire anymore but I do live here and it was a nice opportunity to see some friendly faces and also get acquainted with some new ones. I spent a lot of the weekend hanging out with the German teachers who were well represented there, but I also managed to speak some Spanish as well. 

I was, frankly, not happy with yesterday’s presentation, which was an explanation (in German) of how I use fairy tales in my classroom. I love the topic but small details like the room I presented in being cramped and uncomfortable and my forgetting to set up animations on the texts of my slides messed with my mojo in presenting. 

I’m still glad I did it because fairy tales are really a worthwhile topic to discuss (and use!) pedagogically. They’ve gone through a sort of organic evolution of being entertaining and instructive, for one. Students are often familiar with the stories, or at least the traditional format of fairy tales. (I was shocked how many of my students weren’t familiar with Rumplestiltskin when I taught it last year! Is it one Americans don’t generally know?) Plus, they are reminiscent of childhood, which I find is a big draw for high schoolers. 

And there are so many good resources! I totally recommend Grimms Märchen ohne Worte to any teacher using fairy tales in the classroom, even if German is not your target language. It’s got beautiful, colorful illustrations of many beloved tales that make a great addition to students’ visualization of the texts. Other resources are specific to the target language, but some sites, like the German Project, have equivalents in other world languages as well. 

I’m proud of my fairy tale unit and especially the integrated performance assessment I wrote for it, but, again, I don’t feel I did a great job presenting about it. 

My second presentation, which was this morning, went a lot better, possibly because I had given it last year at the Vermont Foreign Language Teacher Association conference. I also gave it in English — such an easy language to present in! 

The topic was my favorite Comprehensible-Input friendly activities and, well, it’s fun to present about stuff I’m excited about. Sometime soon I’ll pick apart all the CI stuff I do piece by piece, but the highlights this morning were:

• explaining all the cool variations of pictionary I do in class. So fun!
• teaching teachers about Who Could Say as a way to review texts. That is a great one that not a lot of the folks I was presenting to were familiar with. 

All in all I had a nice time at the NHAWLT conference. Every session I went to was useful and engaging and I can’t wait to figure out how to integrate all the new stuff into my classroom practices.