201 Little Hall University of Maine Orono, ME 04469
LANGUAGES: Tools for the 21st Century
The FLAME website offers resources and information for
Maine's K-12
teachers of French, German, Latin, Spanish, ESL and other languages.
News
Meet Your FLAME Board!
Seated, from left to right:
Mary Oches, Fred Ravan (FLAME Past President), Catherine Gram
(FLAME Secretary), and
Kim MacDonald (FLAME Treasurer)
Standing, from left to right:
Donald Reutershan, Ann Sullivan, Dominic
Laflamme (FLAME Vice President), Chris Gram, Priscille Michaud, and
Betsy Hudson
Several other members of the Advisory
Board are not pictured:
Dan Bennett
(FLAME President), Marty Brooks, Dennis Glidden,
Betsy McPhedran, and Ruth Parent.
Would you like to join FLAME? Click
here for a membership
form. You may also use this form to sign up for the spring conference if
you like.
Conference news!!!
Plans for the spring conference are firming up.
We have a number of proposals for workshops that look really excellent,
and we’re looking for a few more. So please consider submitting your
good idea!
Also, we’d like to organize a swap shop this
year. If you have a lesson plan or a unit that you’d like to share,
please bring 25 copies for distribution among the participants in the
exchange. In addition, please be prepared to briefly explain your
submission. Space permitting, we would like to publish a few of these
plans in the FLAME newsletter.
This is also a good time to plan for your
students’ participation in one of the student contests—either the poster
contest or the video contest. Information about the contests can be
found on the FLAME website:
http://www.umaine.edu/flame/student%20contests.htm
We are hoping to find a venue to display the
winners’ work.
Please remember that there will be no onsite
registration at the conference this year, so it’s important to make your
plans early. Your registration form needs to be postmarked by Feb. 15.
Looking forward to see you all at this year’s
spring conference…
FLAME is looking for members who are interested in
serving as Vice-President of the Board. There is an immediate need to
fill the recently vacated position. Please contact Dan Bennett, FLAME
Board President, for more information:
dbennett@fps.k12.me.us
ACTFL held its annual conference in
Denver this year. Betsy Hudson sent along her photos of the conference.
They include photos of the Denver area, of several of our FLAME
colleagues who attended the conference, and of some of the workshops.
Click here to check them out. Thanks, Betsy!
The Language
Acquisition Resource Center (LARC) at San Diego State University and the
Center for Advanced Language Proficiency Education and Research (CALPER)
at Penn State are pleased to announce our webinars on
assessment. If you
were not able to participate in our previous webinars, we invite you to look at the archived
sessions.
Support for this webinar is provided in part by a grant to CALPER and
LARC from the U.S. Department of Education.
And mark your
calendars for:
AATF – Maine encourages teachers to apply for the $250
Richard Williamson Scholarship for Teachers (2012) to attend a
workshop or seminar during the summer for professional growth.
In addition, AATF members are invited to encourage
their juniors and seniors to apply for the
Laurianna Boucher
scholarship.
AATF held a
very successful fall conference at UMA on November 5th. For a summary of
Jean-Claude Reconnet's presentation and some photos of the conference,
click
here and here. Thanks
to Priscille Michaud for sending the photos!
BRING THE WORLD TO YOUR SCHOOL!
Explore these fully funded programs that are supported by the Bureau
of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State and
implemented by American Councils for International Education!
CONNECT INTERNATIONALLY The Educational Seminars Program provides short-term professional
development opportunities to teachers and administrators from around the
world, for 2-3 week reciprocal exchange programs and one-way
professional development programs. Participating countries include
Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, and Uruguay for reciprocal exchanges and
Greece, India, and Italy for one-way programs. All Educational Seminars
provide airfare, training, travel health care, and living costs. For
more information, please visit www.americancouncils.org/es or
email edseminars@americancouncils.org.
Upcoming Program Application Deadlines: January 6 and March 30, 2012
STUDY LANGUAGE IN EGYPT AND CHINA Intensive Summer Language Institutes (ISLI) provides fellowships for
U.S. classroom teachers to spend six weeks overseas studying
intermediate and advanced-level Arabic in Alexandria, Egypt, and Chinese
in Changchun, China. Current K-12 teachers, community college
instructors of Arabic and Mandarin Chinese, and students enrolled in
education programs who intend to teach these languages can apply.
Participants earn ten hours of graduate credit through Bryn Mawr
College, and are provided with peer tutors and roundtrip airfare. All
travel and study-related costs are fully covered. For more information,
please visit www.americancouncils.org/isli or
email
isli@americancouncils.org.
Program Application Deadline: March 2, 20121
AATSP held a very successful fall conference at the Senator Inn in
Augusta on October 21. Click
here
for Betsy Hudson's informative article about the meeting.
Thanks, Betsy, for all you do!
FLAME is a volunteer organization, and every year our members come
together to make the FLAME Conference a success. Is it your turn this
year? What activities would you like to share with your FLAME
colleagues? If you're thinking about submitting a proposal to
present at this spring's FLAME Conference, please click
here for more
information.
Please consider nominating a colleague or a student for one of the FLAME
awards. There are many outstanding students, teachers, and
administrators in Maine, and it is important that we recognize them. The
deadline for all of these awards is Dec 15, so this is a good time to
start thinking about making a nomination.
Interested in a cultural exchange between students from
Bogota, Colombia and your community and school? The Colombian
students very dynamically will share their culture by offering high
quality music and dance presentations for the host school, other schools
and institutions within the community and for the community at large.
Also, the Colombian students hope to visit classrooms during their stay
to offer workshops about their country to help build awareness about
South American cultures and important aspects of this interesting region
of the world, including their rich language of Spanish. Of course the
Colombian students experience the North American culture through this
visit, participating in school activities and living with host families
during this short stay.
Tom Sferes has suggested that the website contain a
listing of links to the various world language teacher webpages
that Maine teachers have developed. This would be an incredibleresource, especially as our laptop initiative is beginning to
expand from the middle school through the high school grades,
and in some cases, to the lower grades.
Please click
here for the links
which I have collected. If you are a teacher in Maine and would
like your webpage to be included, please email me at
mmesorciere@msn.com .
Check this
out! The MERLOT World Languages
Portalis an educational resource
for teaching and learning languages. You are invited to
join and contribute to this growing learning community
by using the online materials and submitting your own
modules for inclusion in the collection. You will find a
wide variety of materials for use online and in the
classroom. Please
join
MERLOT now and become a part of the World Languages
Community. If you have any questions or suggestions,
please
contact the Editor of the World Languages Editorial
Board.
Did you know that FLAME has a
Facebook page?
Also--look
for FLAMEMAINE and follow us on Twitter. This will provide us with
some additional ways to keep in touch.
It was a pleasure to see so many
teachers at our annual spring conference in Portland this year. As always,
the conference provided lots of food for thought--from Professor John
Lalande's keynote to the many fine workshops led, for the most part, by
our wonderful colleagues who teach right here in the State of Maine.
Thanks
to Betsy Hudson for the photos and the following slide show about the conference:
Professor Lalonde has graciously allowed us to post some of his ideas for
warm-up activities at the
beginning of class and also some
questions to mull
over. The participants at Professor Lalande's Friday morning session felt
that these questions were very worthwhile topics for consideration at, for
example, a department meeting.
Each
year FLAME recognizes
someone who has achieved outstanding results in promoting the study of
modern and classical languages in his/her community or region. This year
Kathy Yates is the recipient of the Richard Award for Leadership in Modern and
Classical Language Education.
Thanks to Betsy Hudson for these
videos about Kathy Yates and about the FLAME Conference!
Click here to watch a video about the AATSP
meeting at ther FLAME Conference.
The Maine Department of
Education has a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Ministry of
Education, Social Policy and Sports of Spain (MEPSYD).
This MOU
was created to promote cross-cultural
connections between the citizens of Maine and the people of Spain and to
collaborate on educational initiatives. One such initiative is a
partnership program between elementary, middle or high schools in Maine
and Spain.
If you or
your school is interested in developing a partnership with a school in
Spain, please visit one of the web links below to complete a brief
application. Thank you in advance for your interest in this program.
Did you know that FLAME offers
financial awards and scholarships to FLAME members and their students for a
variety of enrichment activities? Check out Emily Bogner Williams'
report about her summer
immersion in Quebec. If you're interested, go to the "Awards and Grants"
page.
The Peace Corps' Coverdell World Wise Schools has hundreds of Peace
Corps volunteers in 73 countries who are signed up for the Correspondence Match program,
seeking to be connected with a US teacher for a two-year letter writing exchange (once a
month). If you might be interested in participating, please go to our website and click
Educators to sign up:
Have
you ever thought about volunteering for one of the FLAME committees, and then
hesitated out of concern that the job might not be what you expected? We
committee members have all been there! So we decided to put together a "job
description" for each committee so that potential volunteers might find their
"perfect position." Click here to
read about what members of FLAME committees do.
Click
here
for a summary of federal legislative actions related to foreign/world
languages. This report comes from the Joint National Committee for
Languages & National Council for Languages and International Studies (JNCL-NCLIS).
