About
My name is Tammy Aiello. When I've got my "teaching hat" on, I go by Mme Aiello, and I'm the creator of this blog, TpT store, and less well-tended Teachers Notebook store "Teaching FSL". I also curate and participate in multiple collaborative Pinterest boards, which I was excited to find featured in the Dec. 2014 edition of Professionally Speaking.
I'm currently a middle school (Grades 6-8) French Immersion
teacher and have been an OCT (Ontario Certified Teacher) since 1997. Every year
of my teaching career, I have taught French (or in French) for at least half of
my schedule. Prior to taking on an immersion assignment, I taught grades 7-11
Core French, Civics, History, Careers, ESL, Intermediate & Senior English, and
even Visual Arts.
Like many teachers, I may suffer from a
slight coffee addiction and sometimes struggle with the feeling that I want
to (ought to??) take on more than I can. I love reading and movies, and to
spend time with my family. I also may overuse parentheses and ellipses on a
regular basis. Feel free to leave me a comment yelling "STOP IT" if
that starts to drive you batty, and I promise to edit more carefully! ;-)
My blog started in February 2012 as an attempt to reach out
to other French as a Second Language (or French as an Additional Language)
teachers. You can read that first blog post here. It's been my experience that we FSL teachers too often feel
isolated and lost without the vast sea of resources that seem to exist for our
dominant language teaching colleagues. Let's continue to change that together!
I'm open to collaborations which save us
all the effort of individual reinventing the wheel, planning time, (and time
spent translating!!) - sometimes organized through facebook or Twitter, sometimes
undertaken in person - and seven years ago, my TPT store began with the
goal of just sharing some of the teacher-made resources my colleagues in the
same building and board were so happy to get their hands on to use with their
own learners. I figured why not let others see what I'm doing, and stop the
complaints of "There's nothing available out there to teach French!"
Here we are today, with hundreds of other teachers offering French resources
there as well.... it's a great thing! Variety is the spice of life
& the more options we have to meet our learners' individual needs, the
better.