communicative activities
December 21, 2013
2013’s fourth most popular post is a novice-level activity suggestion using the Latin Grammy’s Song of the Year, Marc Anthony’s Voy a vivir. His performance at the Latin Grammys is sure to get everyone moving and singing to the music! —————- The most popular Latin pop song in the country has NOVICE written all over […]
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June 26, 2013
This is the last post in a short series on songs that help students develop accuracy and proficiency in talking about the present tense. For the other songs, see: Sigo con ella Hace tiempo Carmelina (and also, a post on songs for stem-changing present verbs) Tengo tu love – Sie7e This song is another one […]
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May 23, 2013
Every once in a while in my class we took a few days to explore a particular grammar point, because let’s face it – sometimes it’s useful to sit down and examine something quickly so we can move on to the real communicative stuff and maybe put it into practice faster than we would have […]
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April 22, 2013
Recently I blogged about using the proficiency target of talking about future goals and dreams to frame your use of future tense, and I mentioned three songs that are good for highlighting this particular tense. For your intermediate mid/high learners, here are some additional activities I have done with my students to work with future […]
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April 10, 2013
Songs for future tense
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If you’re working with future tense, I recommend doing so around the proficiency goal of talking about goals and dreams, one of our 3 major goals in Spanish 3. This is something high school students are asked to think about and talk about a lot, so it fits in naturally especially in junior and senior […]
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March 26, 2013
Fun activity #9: A leer
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In 2011 I blogged about what a boring teacher I really am and how I was inspired by some conference workshops to make things more fun in the classroom. This is the ninth post on the activities that came out of those experiences: “let’s read.” The premise here is easy – when the random picker […]
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March 21, 2013
Cortometraje for narration
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One of our major goals for Spanish 3 is to refine narration. We believe this is a critical function of language. Teenagers do it all the time. They talk about what they did over the weekend, over the summer, yesterday in math class. They tell stories about the amazing shot at the basketball game or […]
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March 5, 2013
This is part 3 in a short series on songs and activities that improve student accuracy and proficiency in talking about the present. Carmelina – Jorge Correa This is a fun song. If you’re interested in an identical use of no me hagas sufrir, no me hagas llorar, check out Manny Manuel’s No me hagas […]
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February 27, 2013
In Spanish 3 we just wrapped up a unit I reworked to continue working on students’ narration in the past, framed within understanding and talking about the news. This activity we did combines culture, interest, interpretive (reading) skills, presentational (writing), and interpersonal (speaking) skills. First, using a newspaper website or a regional/international version of […]
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February 19, 2013
Feel like your class is disengaged and/or bored? This atmosphere could be rooted in all sorts of problems, but one of the main causes is that you have students focused on the same activity for too long. Based on research, your brain needs breaks from a particular learning-intensive activity in order to process and encode […]
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February 15, 2013
Fun activity #8: A cantar
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In 2011 I blogged about what a boring teacher I really am and how I was inspired by some conference workshops to make things more fun in the classroom. This is the eighth post on the activities that came out of those experiences: “let’s sing.” My lyrics file is currently over 230 pages long. Usually, […]
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February 13, 2013
A while back, a hashtag hit the trending topics on Twitter in Mexico: #quierounnovioque. I used the program Archivist to save the tweets and export them to an Excel file. I often do this if the teaching value of a particular trending topic hits me. In this case, the tweets were full of subjunctive used because […]
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