Square Book + Support Videos (Complete Program)

Asking middle school language teachers to teach their beginning students through worksheets, explicit instruction, practice and correction, as well as through memorization of word lists for tests, is falling out of favor in our profession. Instead, providing interesting and comprehension-based instruction to our students, putting the focus on what the language means and not on how it is structured, is rapidly gaining favor.

The purpose of this book is to provide the middle school language teacher with activities that allow her students to be involved in class without any pressure, to hear the language and just have some fun. Let’s uplift our students with real language – whole and vibrant language – that is enjoyable to them. What else should we be doing, if not that?

Dr. Amy Banner, after putting some of the ideas presented in this book into practice in her classroom, reports:

“I am loving this! The activities have given new energy to my language instruction! I have implemented several of the things already. The kids love creating a character! I did that for an evaluation with 34 kids in my classroom. My administrator told me: ‘I have several people here who could take a lesson from you on having a little fun while learning. You have so much engagement and every single student is involved.’”

When students enjoy learning a language, their confidence goes up and they experience success even if they are not among the few college-bound memorizers. This leads to increased enrollments in our middle and by extension our high school language classes, which in turn leads to increased job satisfaction and greater job security for us.

Moreover, when students enjoy learning the language, the odds that they will choose to become life-long language learners increase. That should be our real goal. We simply don’t have enough time with them to do any more than aim for that goal, that they leave our classrooms feeling confident with the language and wanting to learn more. This is because the actual instructional minutes we have with them doesn’t even scratch the surface of what is necessary for acquisition.

Once the middle school language teacher understands and implements the activities in this curriculum into her instruction, her current unspoken and largely unacknowledged mental suffering will diminish or disappear entirely. She will want to stay in the profession. Therefore, it will be well worth every effort to sprinkle a little or a lot of the Square program into your daily language instruction.