Cotton's Collection

Welcome to my store! I'm Mindy Cotton! I call my store Cotton's Collection because I have been teaching a flexible combination of Spanish and French, from preschool to adults, since 1997. I have been creating and saving everything for years! I'm excited to share these resources with you! Currently, I teach high school Spanish and French in Georgia. (Yes, you will see "y'all" in my resources!) But my first teaching job was in an elementary Spanish program, where I learned the power of songs, games, and visuals. My high schoolers do not really like to sing, but everyone loves strong visual aids, and most of my resources have pictures, graphs, charts, and photos.

Teaching has become so much more challenging since the pandemic, especially for world languages! We want them speaking and interacting with us and with their peers in the target language, but they hardly even want to make friends in English! You will see that a lot of my resources are partner activities that I use to pull the students out of their shells to speak and listen in the language, not just read or write. I try to include a mix of speaking, listening, reading, and writing activities in my resources for each of the themes that I teach, to make sure I'm hitting all the standards. Our field has changed so much over the decades, and I have experimented with a lot of different methodologies and teaching philosophies. I believe there is a place for all teaching styles, and that we as teachers use instructional materials in varied ways and for many diverse purposes. The way I use a resource may be totally different than the way you implement it in your classroom! Even the way I use a resource now may differ from how I used it in the past, or will use it in the future!

In the middle part of my career, for 8 years, I ran a foreign exchange program between my high school and a high school in Rennes, France. Every other year, we would either host French students at our high school and in our students' homes, or we would go to Rennes and do homestays and attend French high school with our "corrés." It was an awesome, challenging experience that was so impactful and motivating for the students!

I post in stops and starts on TPT, mostly because right when I started my store in 2019, I also was accepted into a doctoral program at Indiana University Bloomington. For 5 years I was grinding out an Ed.D. in Literacy, Culture, and Language Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. I defended my dissertation in March, 2025. The doctorate was a tremendously rewarding experience, but it was a lot of time and work! (So many discussion posts!!) I hadn't been to school since I finished my M.A. in Spanish Literature and Culture from GA State University back in 2005.

I'm also a mom of four. My youngest will graduate in 2026, so this is my last year raising kids and teaching at the same time, after almost 30 years--Whoo Hoo!! I have always liked to travel, garden, and exercise, but I have also recently been exploring salsa dance classes, particularly Rueda de Casino!