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The things that strikes me as interesting with this article is the fact that these two teachers are team teaching and each one is centered around a different language.  The fact that the class is taught in both English and Spanish is pretty cool and is great for all types of students.  Faltis, a bilingual language scholar, draws from the work of situated learning theory, in which the underlying premise is that learning is social and results from participating in social practices appropriate to a specific community of practice.  These fifth grade students all had memories in their life that impacted their life and made them who they were.  When Faltis speaks of learning because of social practices and a specific community, he is stating that a student’s environment determines what that student will be accustomed to and learn from.  These students were able to create their own personal memoirs after they we exposed to examples.  These students not only created their own memoirs, but they also presented them in their second language.  The best part of this article was the story that Carolina wrote about her brother waking her up every morning.  That was a powerful, but simple entry that only took her 10 minutes to create.  Memoirs create a sense of community and create a bond in the classroom.

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