Explore! Curriculum Celebrates three years, four languages, & 500 products!
Early in 2021 my career took an unexpected twist. I had been doing a side gig writing curriculum for corporate training webinars. The work was a great supplement to my teaching salary, and I loved it… until cutbacks at the company resulted in a sudden end to my project. I was disappointed and wondered what was next. My colleague Claire Wentzel, the brilliant graphic designer for the now-defunct project, asked me a question that changed my life: What would you REALLY like to do?
I realized what I really want to do is start a curriculum business. I’d thought about this before, but the design aspect was holding me back. Fortunately, Claire could help with this! She stepped in with her amazing design skills (along with her knowledge and experience with brand development) and Explore! Curriculum was born!
Fast forward three years, and Explore! is home to over five hundred unique world language teaching resources, with product lines in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and ELL as well as limited Chinese resources and other languages coming soon! We also have a growing line of professional development offerings for World Language and general education teachers. I wrote about our products on our one year anniversary (and you can read about it here).
Today I’d like to share some of our newer products, along with some updates on what’s coming next for our little company!
African Culture Series
Most French teachers would like to incorporate more lessons on Francophone Africa, but there’s a dearth of positive, engaging resources. (Most lessons have students learn facts about African countries, or they focus on social problems such as poverty.)
The African culture series is different. Each lesson includes positive, engaging cultural resources and extensive teacher notes to help guide students in making meaningful cultural comparisons. Lessons also include a hands-on project or activity helping students experience a small taste of life in Africa. Lessons are appropriate for French learners (or for Social Studies classes). Explore! uses the approach of finding cultural resources developed by members of the target culture; we then help teachers guide students in uncovering what that resource says about the culture.
African Culture is an innovative series. I’m not aware of anything else like it on the market, and it’s probably my favorite resource in the Explore! Curriculum store!
Scribble Games and Word Walls
These two product lines complement our flagship Authentic Vocabulary product line. Authentic Vocabulary uses an investigative approach, allowing students to learn vocabulary for themselves by exploring target language texts. Authentic Vocabulary makes vocabulary introduction a student-driven rather than a teacher-driven process, and you can read more about it here.
In the past two years, Explore! staff has developed a scribble game and a word wall to reinforce each Authentic Vocabulary lesson. We carefully selected the visuals to appeal to older students. Check them out in French, Spanish, English, and Portuguese.
Artful Reading Comprehension
Artful Reading Comprehension is a fun way to strengthen novice students’ reading skills. Each worksheet includes short paragraphs in the target language which students must illustrate. The assessment is built in; the accuracy of the students’ drawings lets you know what they understood!
Teachers and students both love Artful Reading Comprehension!
“This is a wonderful resource for Core French students to read and comprehend.”
“This is a great activity to practice listening comprehension with my newcomer students!”
Like all our products, Artful Reading Comprehension worksheets are fully editable so you can adjust them to meet your students’ needs.
Everyday Language
Everyday Language products are fun, stand-alone lessons showing casual, popular-culture language use. Kids love learning about movie titles, text language, or animal sounds. Want to prank your students on April Fools’ Day? There’s an Everyday Language lesson for that!
Unit Slideshows and Proficiency-Based Projects
Our two newest product lines are being developed in tandem. Unit Slideshows allow teachers to introduce key content and to provide meaningful student practice. Each slide includes visuals carefully selected to appeal to older students, and the units come with links to ready-to-copy student practice and vocabulary handouts.
Proficiency-Based projects are innovative activities designed to assess student mastery of course content. They include project instructions for teachers and for students, ready-to-copy student handouts, and a suggested project rubric with objective measures for easy grading. Every page of these products is editable, providing maximum flexibility for your teaching style and students’ needs.
In addition to adding hundreds of products, and new languages (Portuguese, ELL, and some Chinese), Explore! staff have been busy writing over forty new blog posts, adding new contributors (Shelby Cole in ELL and Rong Zhang in Chinese) and developing professional development sessions which we’ve presented at world language conferences around the country. Whew! It’s been an amazing two years of growth!
What’s next?
We will continue building out our Unit Slideshow and Proficiency Based Projects lines, culminating in a full level 1 & 2 curriculum for our three major languages (French, Spanish, and ELL). We also want to expand our Portuguese and Chinese product lines, add more African Culture lessons, continue our blog including series on differentiation, listening instruction, and 90% target language use (spoiler: I don’t hold myself to this expectation). We also have plans to keep presenting online and in person…. In other words, there’s more great content ahead from Explore! Curriculum! Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter so you won’t miss a thing.
What is your favorite resource from Explore! Curriculum? How has our work helped your teaching? Share in the chat, and thank you for sharing your language-teaching journey with us!
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