Ángela Gutiérrez

agutierrez@milwaukee-montessori.org

Señorita Ángela Gutiérrez began her career at MMS fresh out of college, after graduating from UW-Madison, as a Children's House Assistant Teacher and soon afterwards began immersing the younger students in the wonderful world of Spanish!

With nearly a decade of experience under her belt and continual extensive research on the best foreign language teaching practices (CI, AIM & TPRS) Señorita Gutiérrez is known for building healthy brain habits in her classroom as well as allowing artistic expression with students. Examples include: 1) utilizing American Sign Language to provide visual support, solidify comprehension, increase retention and scaffold options for participation without English use, 2) incorporating Animated Short Films to engage learners via the storytelling method: Movie Talk, where students listen, write, & verbally respond to prompts about sequencing, accuracy of detail recall, inferencing and their own lives, 3) emphasizing the importance of the phonetic nature of the language and using exaggerated facial expressions to attain accurate pronunciation until it becomes more natural for learners and is no longer necessary to ‘act it out and 4) embodying song and literature where one rapidly acquires vocabulary, perfects their pronunciation and finely tunes his/her eyes and ears to a new language.



When not singing, dancing, acting or laughing with students or creating holiday art installations around the educational grounds, she can be found creating art at coffee shops, attending live music shows, bouldering (climbing walls in a gym or actual rock faces in outdoor competitions), as well as soaking up the sun at Bradford beach.