Uncategorized
December 27, 2010
I love collaboration
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Ever since someone said something about not reinventing the wheel it seems we’ve all been in a search to see how much of our work other people have already done. Right? Not really. Actually we still have a tendency to shut ourselves in our classrooms and overwork ourselves and burn out doing things that hundreds […]
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December 24, 2010
It doesn’t take a teacher to realize that training students to translate doesn’t produce proficiency. If you want to look into the SLA research behind why translation slows language processing so much (and if you are a teacher, you owe it to yourself to get this and let it revolutionize your methodology), start with this […]
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December 20, 2010
I got a question via @espanolsrs about how I “teach” songs and whether my students understand what they’re singing. I thought I’d written a post about this before but when I browsed through my song label I didn’t see anything about it. Probably I just thought about it and didn’t actually write it (that happens […]
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November 15, 2010
iPad giveaway!
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Because what techy teacher couldn’t use an iPad? Here’s all the info in the blog post at the Art of Random Willy-Nillyness. Good luck!
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November 11, 2010
This year I noticed that my AP Spanish (4th year at my school) class had a lower listening proficiency than my previous class. As I reflected on possible causes for this, I realized that since I’d moved classrooms into a room without a VCR and thus stopped moving slowly through tapes of prior years’ Latin […]
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October 29, 2010
And the winner is…
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This year I picked up some early childhood Spanish to free up some time for our K-8 teacher to increase his instruction in our grades 6-8. So I teach 3-year-olds through 1st grade. I get 10 minutes per week with 3-year-olds, 15 minutes with 4-year-olds, and 20 minutes with kindergarten and 1st grade. The first […]
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October 1, 2010
Want to guide your advanced students through a culturally-relevant novel by a Hispanic author, written specifically to adolescents? Good! Intensive reading for pleasure is the best way to acquire vocabulary in any language. I’ve put an incredible amount of work into writing reading guides and vocabulary lists for all 20 chapters of Ciudad de las […]
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September 23, 2010
Books recommended as ‘easy’
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I found a helpful post on Amazon.com where someone recommends easy novels to read while learning Spanish. I hope to order them and see whether they might be good for Spanish 2, since I’m all about feeding kids authentic rather than learner Spanish from the beginning. One is La Tierra del Fuego, and the other […]
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September 23, 2010
This is an old song by Juanes but great for ‘ya no’- a phrase used so frequently that doesn’t have a good matchup as far as syntax with English. You could say “no longer” but we typically have the ‘not’ paired with do/does + ‘anymore’ after the main verb… yuck. ‘Ya no’ is much more […]
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September 18, 2010
Someone at my session asked for resources for math in Spanish. I promised I’d try to post some. Look here for a list I found. Also I forgot that I had this resource, education tools from the Department of Education in Venezuela.
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September 18, 2010
Searching BBC Mundo
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I promised to add some information as I stumbled through searching on BBC Mundo during my presentation Prompts with Power. As it turns out, I was thinking of the Radio ONU website–theirs is easily searchable and programs are scripted. To search BBC Mundo for print sources, go to Google, and on the right, click ‘advanced […]
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September 17, 2010
These are the sample prompts we are doing in my presentation, Prompts with Power, with sources. Unit theme: Interpersonal relationships Prompt theme: Adamari Lopez and Luis Fonsi divorce LEVEL 1 Target “should” She is sick. He “should…” Extend: why? LEVEL 2 Target: talking about the past Compare their relationship to a time when an illness […]
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