Episode 107: Making Room for Words- Out of Bounds Word Wall

I didn't know I would have SO much to say in this episode but goodness we covered a LOT of gold! All of the links and people mentioned in this episode are linked below: 

• Anna - From where I teach
• My "photo dump" from last week (Facebook here)
• Rock Paper Scissors Variations
• Margarita Pérez García
• Story Listening Dr. Beniko Mason
• Alice Ayel
• Megan Hayes
• Pictionary page
• LFL members log in here for Rainbow Road access!
• Get on the waitlist for LFL PLC!

YAY! Spooky Season is here! Check out this blog that highlights all my BEST Spooky Season resources! Your students are going to LOOOVE them! I know you will too!

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Transcript

Hello! Hi, it's me, La Maestra Loca, and before you listen to this amazing episode of Teaching La Vida Loca, I want to first allow a message from our sponsors to play.

Hello, my name is Annabelle, and I am the sponsor of the Teaching La Vida Loca podcast. And yes, it is in fact me, La Maestra Loca, one and the same. Today I'm so excited to tell you about my spooky season resources that are all available on my TPT, and soon will no longer be available there, and only available on my website. Get excited! But right now you can head over to the blog post from last year, which is in the show notes, and it includes a whole bunch of my favorite resources for the season of October, when kids are really excited about spooky stuff. I have a lot of legends that are really fun to teach and that give you ideas for how to lead into projects where students can write about creatures that they create. I also have an amazing pumpkin glyph activity that went over so well with my students last year, and it's a really easy thing for you to display. It's also great for a sub day. And then there are also some legends and other easy low-prep and no-prep resources from my dear friend Viviana that are linked there. Viviana is the person who helps me with all the resources in Familia Loca. She's awfully talented and makes everything really beautiful in a way that I can't, or I haven't learned to yet. So I'm really excited for you to explore these. Head on over to the link in the show notes and check out my spooky season resources, and thank you so much for supporting me and supporting this podcast. I know you're going to love these resources, and guess who's going to love them even more? Your kids! It's going to be great! Okay, enjoy the episode. Take care. Okay, bye-bye then.

Welcome back to Teaching La Vida Loca, the podcast you come to for short and sweet and sometimes spicy episodes full of enthusiasm, magic, and tips and tricks for your classroom. I'm Annabelle, your Maestra Loca, and I'm here to bring you inspiration, unapologetic authenticity, and ideas to spark more joy in your teaching journey. I'm turning up the excitement and elated to have you right here with me. I'm not just your host, I'm your cheerleader, and I'm thrilled you're tuning in. So let's do this. Let's tackle Teaching La Vida Loca together.

Okay, okay, okay. Here we are, Episode 107 of Teaching La Vida Loca, and I am realizing that I didn't promote Episode 106 one single time, which is bananas. But also, that's okay. I'm trying, and I'm being more consistent than ever with my podcast. So yay me! Everybody, aplausos for me, please. ¡Aplausos, aplausos! I'm doing what I can, you know? We're mom-ing full-time, we're wife-ing full-time, we're adulting full-time, most of the time as best we can, teaching full-time, business-owning as best I can, when I can, and promoting my podcast has not been great. But guess what? 296 of you still listened to it, despite me literally talking about it one time on my Instagram stories. So I'm going to do a better job of promoting it. If you didn't listen to it, go back and listen to Episode 106, because I talked about a recent project I did with my eighth grade honors students, and I talk a lot about how I make sure I'm talking about culture and current events all the time, but using the target language that my kids have.

So thank you to those of you who listened without promotion. That probably means you're following this podcast, or you have it pinned or whatever, so that you're notified when there's a new episode. It means a lot to me. Like I said, I really like sharing this way. If you are somebody who has an extra five minutes (and who am I talking to? Teachers. What extra five minutes?), I would love an Apple review. In fact, I just thought I should read one that was recently posted. It was so epic, and it was such a treat because I hadn't checked my podcast reviews in forever.

So I'm going to read this really quickly, if I can find it. Oh, there it is. Here we go. "Life changed. I'm in awe. I can't lie, as dedicated as I am to the teaching field and to Spanish teaching, I started my eighth year of teaching this year and I was feeling disillusioned. I'm the only Spanish teacher in my district, and I have not been able to find any funding to attend professional development in my eight years. I found out about this podcast over the summer, and it has profoundly changed not only my teaching, but my life in general. Annabelle is so inspirational in so very many ways. She has inspired me to be the most authentic version of myself" (yay, I'm so proud of you; sorry, that was my insert there) "which is a gift I could never express my gratitude for through words alone. Her tips and tricks for Spanish teaching have profoundly changed the way I teach and the culture and environment in my Spanish classroom and math classroom. I'm still looking for professional development funding and am very hopeful I will be able to join her professional learning community, Familia Loca." And it sounds like you'd be a really good fit. We would love to have you. "Annabelle has been the answer to so many of my prayers and is an absolutely wonderful human being. I would give her 10 billion stars if I could."

I cannot tell you how much, when things are feeling really hard, reading that is huge for me. Really, really huge. So thank you for taking the time. It's hard work to teach and to run a business and to parent, and to feel like I have my, you know, what do people say? Hats in so many baskets? That's not right, right? Shoes in baskets? Whatever, you know what I'm saying. It's hard work, and I love doing it, and I'm grateful that it is impacting you. I really appreciate when I get to hear about it, and it helps put me in front of others. So thank you for taking the time.

On to this week's episode. Okay, so I've been trying something new. Speaking of never having time to post anything, I've been following Anna. Her name is Anna, and she has an Instagram account (From Where I Teach) that I'll paste in the show notes. She teaches English in Spain, I've been following her for years, and she has an enormous account. She's a huge, huge account, way bigger than mine. A few years ago, I started noticing that she would do this thing in her stories (I'm not sure if she does it on her feed as well, but it always popped up in my stories) where she would share the top things of her week that happened in her classroom. I don't know why it never dawned on me to do it for myself, but I started doing it, and it's such an easy post on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday for me to literally just go through my camera roll and post pictures from my week. All I do is pick the pictures and put a tiny little caption on top of each picture, a tiny little sentence describing what's happening. Then I share all of those photos (last week I think I posted 12) to my Instagram and Facebook, and I say, "Let me know what you want to hear more about." People comment, and this week I decided to do this podcast based on what people wanted to know more about. The number one thing people wanted to know more about was my out of bounds word wall.

So the first thing I'm going to share in the show notes is Anna's Instagram link, because I can't for the life of me think of the name of her account right now. The second thing I'm going to share is my most recent recap-of-the-week post (most recent as of right now, when I'm recording this, which is October 13). And the third thing is going to be a link to... no, that's it, y'all. I'm so tired.

Here we go. I'm going to talk to you about my out of bounds word wall, but first, are you ready? Are you ready for a brain break? Okay, you can probably guess why I needed a brain break, because my brain was literally farting. It's going on, y'all. I can't think, but that's okay. It's time for a break. So I'm going to teach you a brain break that I've been doing lately in my classroom, and it is just an alternate version of rock, paper, scissors. I blogged about alternate versions of rock, paper, scissors a million years ago, so I'll share that post in the show notes as well. But what you need to know is this one is spooky season themed. I call it zombie, ghost, witch, and I introduced that vocab in Spanish. It works well because we're doing spooky-themed stuff in my novice classes, so they already know the words ghost and witch, which is great, and zombi is a cognate for them.

For ghost, they have to put their hands above their head and make the ghost sound. For witch, they have to look like they're flying on a broom. The way I have my kids do it, they hold what looks like a broom far in front of them, and their other hand goes way above their head in a diagonal direction, and they do a cackle. It's really good. And for the zombie, they stick their hands out in front of them like a zombie and moan. So that's the low tone. La bruja, the witch, is the high tone. El zombi is the low tone. And el fantasma, the ghost, is somewhere in between. Have students stand back to back, and they say, "Uno, dos, tres," and then they turn around. It could be in whatever language you want. One, two, three, and then they turn, and they are immediately in one of those positions, and they are making the sound. Now, are they always going to make the sound? No. Sometimes they're not going to want to 100%. However, the goal is for them to also make the sound. It's super fun, it's great for spooky season, and everybody gets a kick out of it.

Now, what beats what? Talk about it with your kids, because it's really fun to see what they have to say. In my upper-level classes, we did this in Spanish. In lower levels, we just quickly did it in English. Ghost beats zombie, because a zombie cannot bite into ghost flesh. You cannot turn a ghost into a zombie, right? So ghost beats zombie. It bypasses its physical attacks. Zombie beats witch, because the mindless physical aggression disrupts the spellcasting, obviously. The zombie can just grab onto the broom, drag her down, and bite her, and she becomes a zombie witch. And witch beats ghost, because the magic she can cast traps spirits. Makes sense. Ghost beats zombie, zombie beats witch, witch beats ghost. Cool. It's so fun. I hope you enjoy it, I hope you play it with your classes, I hope it's awesome, and I can't wait to hear about it. You're welcome. Why is that little ditty so satisfying? I literally love that song so much. I don't always remember to do a brain break in the middle of a podcast episode, but when I do, my goodness, is it good.

And moving on. Okay, the out of bounds word wall. It had been a long time since I'd been able to have an out of bounds word wall, and I started it again last year, because I have moved back into a space that allows for it, which is awesome. But I have been in classroom spaces where I just couldn't make it happen. So this might work for many of you, and for others it may not, if you're in a classroom space that just doesn't have the place for it. My out of bounds word wall is a giant whiteboard on the right wall if you are facing the front of the classroom. My students sit in a giant horseshoe, and there are seven students who have to physically turn their head, or their head and neck, to see the out of bounds word wall. Is that ideal? Absolutely not. But the whole point of calling it an out of bounds word wall is that it is extra. It is bonus. It is out of bounds.

What do I mean by that, and why do I call it out of bounds? I want to remind you all that I grew up as a teacher under the leadership of Diana Noonan in Denver Public Schools, and I had the opportunity to be mentored by the best of the best when it comes to teaching with acquisition-driven instruction. It is the only way I've ever taught. I got to live in the back of Mark Mallaney's classroom and Paul Kirschling's classroom. I got to learn directly from Mary Overton in my first official year, and I got to co-teach with her. I was hand-held by Diana Noonan. My professional development was from Jason Fritze and Carol Gaab. These are the people she hired to train us in Denver Public Schools during our professional development days. So I was so fortunate. I was also fortunate to work with Jenny Wetzig, who was going through the same program as me, and we were both super nerds who really wanted to do this and do it well. Because Mark Mallaney told us we needed to, when we were baby teachers, brand new to teaching this way, we would sit and script out everything we were going to say. It was so much work, but I believe it is why I'm able to do what I do today, because I took these baby steps in the very beginning to make sure I was staying super-duper sheltered and intentional about what language I was using.

I was reminded of the power of this at CI Down Under recently. I was able to attend CI Down Under in 2024 and 2026. The first one was in Sydney, and the second time was in Brisbane. I did language labs and workshops, and this last time I gave the opening and closing keynotes, and that was wonderful. But one of the greatest joys of being there was getting to meet Margarita Pérez García in person for the first time ever. She is somebody I've admired from afar for a long time, and now I get to call her one of my mamas and have her phone number and all these things. Meeting her in person was like meeting a celebrity. I'm going to link to her website so you can check out her readers and her work. Margarita is a full-time teacher, and she writes a whole bunch of amazing books that you can check out for your world language classroom.

I was blown away. This last time we were there, she did an entire lesson in Māori for us using Story Listening. She almost exclusively uses Story Listening in her classroom, and she was taught this by Dr. Beniko Mason. If you don't know about Story Listening, I encourage you to go check it out and learn about it from Dr. Beniko Mason. There are a lot of websites out there, but Dr. Beniko Mason was the creator, and Margarita does an amazing job of it. If you're a Familia Loca member, by the way, go into Rainbow Road, because we have an entire Story Listening unit with every speaker we've ever hired who uses it exclusively in their room, like Alice Ayel and Megan Hayes. You can go and watch all of those recordings, and they are really powerful. It's under Rainbow Road, under Story Listening, for Familia members.

Okay, so Margarita did this lesson, and it was so stinking good, and we were all so wrapped up in her story. And she had a script. The one and only expert, the phenomenal, increíble mujer that she is, had a script, and she talked about the absolute importance of having this script, because she knew she had to stick to a very limited number of words or she would get carried away. That is why I was scripting in the beginning, when I was new to this, and Margarita reminded me that there is power in still scripting, to make sure we are staying intentional and sheltered in our vocabulary so that we can go slow and make sure the language we're using is powerful. So if you're new to doing this, and you're not already sold on scripting, I strongly encourage you to script it out.

Second, let's get back to this idea of in bounds versus out of bounds. In-bounds words are words that I want to repeat very intentionally, as many times as possible during the lesson. They are the words that I'm really targeting. Right now in my novice classes, they are "has fear" (is scared), "looks at," and "wears." Wears is early to introduce. I don't normally introduce wears this early, but it just goes really well with the Clip Chat we're doing, so I'm introducing it. And already there have been some out of bounds words that have come up. The out of bounds words are words that are essential to doing the Clip Chat that we're doing. If you don't do Clip Chats, you could insert the word story, or One Word Image, or whatever it is you're doing with your class as the baseline of how you're delivering the input, whether it's a special person interview or whatever it is. The words you're targeting might be "wants," "wants to have," or "wants to be," but the out of bounds vocabulary is the extra words that come up in the target language that are essential to get through the story, the clip, whatever it is. It is not considered high frequency. It is not your target vocabulary, but the kids need it, the kids want it, or it's just essential to the video you're watching.

An example for me of out of bounds vocabulary that we've needed is ghost, costume, and friends. Now, some of my students told me, "I already know friends, you don't need to write friends up." And I'm like, "Some of us may not know friends, and that's okay." So I'm going to write amigos up anyway on our out of bounds word wall. Costume, disfraz, is absolutely, totally out of bounds. Do we need it for this story? 100%. So I've written it. And because of a powerful workshop that we just went through in Familia Loca, I also assigned gestures to the out of bounds words that are going to be used frequently, because I've found that students acquire them more quickly if they have a gesture.

So like I said, the majority of my class can see my out of bounds word wall. However, there are students who have to physically turn their neck or their head or both to see it. They know to do this, because I do a lot of intentional pausing and pointing. If I am not physically walking over to the out of bounds wall to reference a word, I am taking the time to point dramatically. And then my technology ambassador (I have a student with the job of tech ambassador) is using our laser pointer and pointing at the word I mentioned, so that the kids see the translation on the out of bounds word wall. Then the attention comes back to me, and I continue to speak. So I use and reference this wall a lot to recycle the words.

The other thing that's powerful about it is that my novices have their out of bounds words, but other out of bounds words are coming up for my eighth graders that my sixth graders haven't seen yet. Like today: lugar. In my eighth grade regular class, we were working on circumlocution, and one of them was like, "I really just need 'place.'" And I'm like, "We know place. Let's think about it." And somebody said, "Lugar," and I said, "Excellent." So we put lugar up on the wall. My sixth graders saw that later today, and they were like, "No, no, no, es un lugar..." and they were circumlocuting using the word the eighth graders had put on the wall, because it was there, so they were trying to use it. Now, a lot of times I don't love it when kids try to use words we haven't acquired yet. But when the words are easy, and they're learning how to sound things out phonetically, and they're using them to communicate, that is such a huge win for me, right? They're automatically acquiring other words.

Also, everybody's so nosy. It gives me the opportunity to bring in sneaky input, because they just want to gossip about other classes. It's very funny. Chismosas, right? Clases chismosas, gossipy classes. Last week a class was like, "Why did you need the word fluffy? When did fluffy come up?" And I was like, "Ooh, class. Okay. Les explico. I'll explain it to you." And then I was able to give them juicy input using class vocabulary to tell them exactly why that word came up. It's such a powerful way to expose them to new vocab. And then it just lives there, and it grows and grows and grows, because the whiteboard is huge. I would say within another month I'm going to be erasing it all, and they freak out. They freak out when I erase the out of bounds word wall. But I'm like, "We have to keep going. We need more words."

Now, a couple of other things. If you are listening to this and you are in Familia Loca and you want to know more about word walls, go and listen to the workshop of the month for October 2026, because our entire workshop of the month was about scaffolded supports for our students. Viviana and I presented together. I presented on word walls, and Viviana (this was crazy) presented on the way she uses anchor charts, and the way her students steer how the anchor charts are created and how they are displayed in her classroom. She teaches high school. Oh my gosh, it was so good, and it's directly related to the resource of the month. So go back and watch October's recording. You're going to love it.

Now, how can we leverage this out of bounds word wall more? One of my favorite things to do, which I shared at the end of this workshop, is this. You know how sometimes you have five minutes left of class and you're like, "Well, sugar muffins, what am I going to do?" We have finished the read and discuss, I don't know where to go from here, and I don't really love the energy right now, so I don't want to do a crazy brain break. A great thing to do is have them get out their binders, open up to their Pictionary section or class resource section, and work on their Pictionary. If you have never seen a Pictionary, I will link my free resource for you. A Pictionary is literally a piece of paper with lots of boxes on it. The bigger boxes have tiny boxes underneath where the students write a word, and then they illustrate that word in the big box above it. They don't write the English; they're literally illustrating. So they're adding words that are interesting to them to their picture dictionary. I'll literally tell them, "We have five minutes left. I want you to choose five words and add them to your picture dictionary." So everybody quickly grabs their own, and they're looking at the out of bounds word wall, or at our high-frequency word walls, and they're choosing the ones they want to add.

The power of choice is important, because I'm not saying, "These are the words I want you to add." They are far more likely to do it and be invested and interested if they get to choose the vocab they want. And then I tend to see that vocab pop up more in their writing samples, because they have written it down. It's stickier for them. It's more meaningful, because it's something they chose because they want to acquire it. So I really love an out of bounds word wall. It's a powerful way to bring more vocabulary into the classroom.

And what did I do when I didn't have one? I wrote the out of bounds words on my whiteboard as we went through class, and at the end of class we would erase them. And that's okay, because I didn't have the classroom space or the wall space or the whiteboards to do it. The classroom I was in at my previous school was a very, very long classroom, and it was a science lab. So I literally only had one whiteboard at the very, very front of my classroom and a whiteboard at the very, very, very back, but it was like a mile away. My classroom just didn't lend itself to it. So as out of bounds words came up, I would write them on the whiteboard, and then we would erase them at the end of class.

A common question that comes up when I talk about the out of bounds word wall in workshops, or about out of bounds words in general, is how many out of bounds words should you have in a class? If we go back to this idea of scripting and really being intentional about the language we want to use, my goal is no more than three out of bounds words per class. That's really hard, y'all. That is really hard. And my students can do incredible things with writing and with speaking. Why? Because I am incredibly intentional about the language I am using with them. I shelter, shelter, shelter. Am I sheltering grammar? No. My novices have already heard and read a ton of past tense this year. We are in mid-October, and we started speaking in Spanish in late August. They have already been reading in the past tense. Anytime we read about a story we already told, they're reading it in the past tense, because that's natural. We've told the story, so now it's in the past tense. The reason it's not a big deal is that it's just not a big deal to them, because their entire journey of acquiring language is already so different from mine. I learned Spanish. I learned about the language and its structure and how it functions long before I actually acquired it, when I lived in Spain. But that's a whole other conversation for another time. I just wanted to plop that little nugget in there.

I really thought this episode was going to be 10 minutes long. It's 28 minutes already, so I will wrap it up here. I hope this was useful for you, and I hope you can start playing with the idea of an out of bounds word wall, or maybe even just an out of bounds word poster: once the poster is full, it comes down and you start a new one. It is really, really fun, and I love seeing how all the classes feed off of each other's out of bounds words and how it just grows. Go and check out my Instagram and Facebook if you want to look at more recaps of the week. I'm trying to post them on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, just to review my week in the classroom. And if you're ever interested in learning more about something, comment, and maybe I'll do my next podcast on it. Yay!

Thank you. Thank you again for listening and for allowing me to support you and your students in this way. Thank you for taking a second to rate the podcast or even write a review on Apple. It really makes my day, and it really helps get this in front of other teachers and other students. So if it's brought you joy, let's help it impact others too. Thank you for listening. And until next time, I'll be teaching La Vida Loca, and I'm sure you will be too. Take care. Bye-bye!