Black out poetry with article, poem or song

This past Black History Month, my 8th grade class studied Afro Peruvians and specifically the poem Me gritaron negra by Victoria Santa Cruz. My goals for this unit included not only exposing students to this important poem, but for them to demonstrate their understanding of the poem with their own interpretation. Our school wide theme

Super Bowl 2023 Activities

Each year, I love to spend the Friday before the Super Bowl talking about it! More and more Latino players are starting to play in the NFL. I have kept some of the facts the same as last year, but I have modified some of them for this year. By the end of this lesson,

Happiness mini-unit: Novice students

This year, one of our central themes was joy and togetherness. With this idea, I decided to ask the question of my sixth graders: what makes us happy? I have to say that a lot of this was inspired by my conversations with Samara Spielberg who has done a lot of work on social-emotional learning.

Heavenly Bites: Mexico Tortas

I really love a lot of the documentaries that Netflix has been producing that focus on various cultures in Latin America! The most recent one is Heavenly Bites: Mexico. I created a few day lesson plan to look at the tortas episode. Overall, we are studying the influences of other cultures on Mexican food and

Super Bowl Lesson Plans: 2022

Happy week before the Super Bowl! Next week, I am going up to present at NECTFL twice! (If you are going, I am presenting on Comprehensible Pop Culture and Best of GWATFL about Interpersonal Tasks and Assessments on Saturday. I would love to see you there!). For both my fifth and sixth graders, I am

Links to help during January

I know that many teachers are feeling frustrated with the flux of what is happening in schools. Many days, we don’t know how many students will actually be in our classes. There are a lot of different scenarios- but some of the main threads are similar. There will be days this month that we want

Lesson Plan Template

We recently had our fifth EdCampCIVa! I am so grateful to my former school for hosting us and that we pulled it off with everything going on this year! During the sessions, I talked about starting off class with input and how valuable that is- but how exhausting it can be as well. How can

Street Food: Netflix Viewing Guides

Have you seen the newest series Street Food: Latin America from Netflix? It is amazing, and the visual shots of food is worth watching alone! However, many of the episodes focus on the role of women in street food and at times underrepresented groups. Because of this, I knew that I wanted to use these

A round-up of online resources and final novel project

Final project for middle schoolers This week, I designed a final project for my 8th graders. (The link has the instructions and a rubric as well.)They just finished reading Bianca Nieves and we had embedded a few cultural topics throughout. I wanted to try to have my students revisit the activities that they had done

Online and printable activities for extended closings

Whew! That was a week. It was definitely difficult. I am sure that my week mirrored your week. I was dealing with making plans for my own students and then BAM! My son’s school decided to cancel for Friday. At 11:30 PM. After telling us earlier in the evening that they wouldn’t cancel on Friday.