communicative activities
March 23, 2011
(Trying to) Make learning fun
premium
What happens when all the fun goes out of learning language? The students disengage. Learning doesn’t have to be entertainment for entertainment’s sake, but I’m learning that if students aren’t engaged in learning, they see it as hard and not just boring–the opposite of fun. Hi, my name is Sra. Cottrell and I am not […]
premium
February 14, 2011
#Charlando para aprender
premium
¡Hola! Soy profesora de español en el estado de Kentucky en los Estados Unidos. Unos cuantos otros profesores y yo hemos decidido pedirles a nuestros estudiantes que se involucren en Twitter – twitteando en español, con otros hispanohablantes, para que aprendan comunicarse mejor en la comunicación interpersonal. ¿Es usted un hispanohablante que quiera twittear con […]
premium
February 11, 2011
There are a lot of problems with current world language teaching in the U.S. I think the biggest problem is that we’re trying to teach it the way we teach everything else, when language used for communication is not learned or stored the way other subjects are, and the answer is to look back at […]
premium
August 12, 2010
First 12 days of Spanish 1
premium
A couple of posts down Jen asked if I had lessons to go along with the Spanish 1 scope and sequence and vocabulary list. I do! A few, anyway, and at least you can see how I organize and move through Musicuentos. Here are the first 12 days of Spanish 1, in fairly good detail. […]
premium
August 7, 2010
About three years ago I finally obeyed the inner voice that was yelling at me that textbooks were terribly unmotivating and out-of-date as soon as they were printed and we closed our textbooks forever and haven’t looked back, in Spanish 1 through 3 anyway (we do use a workbook some in AP to get students […]
premium
January 7, 2010
A little while ago I made a post about pleasure reading that elicited a few comments from Bethanie: Bethanie said… Could you elaborate on what you do with the reading guides/palabras claves? I would like to incorporate more long reading into my classes in addition to the shorter pieces I already use, but struggle with […]
premium
November 21, 2009
A case for free-topic blogging
premium
I despise traditional homework. I think in language acquisition, it doesn’t help. If you want kids to learn to drill conjugations, give them worksheets, but otherwise, keep ALL your assignments and assessment communicative. For me, this means that most of what I could ask them to do at home, they’ll get frustrated doing on their […]
premium
March 12, 2009
I just did this with my Spanish 2 students and was surprised at how well it worked. I went to Google news and typed in a couple of our newsy vocab words from recent weeks–like choque and testigo–and also the helping verb ‘han.’ I printed out 3 articles (it was 2 pages front and back) […]
premium
February 19, 2009
A product I love
premium
EMC Paradigm has a product out called SymTalk. The part I use is a set of 256 symbol cards that are magnetic. (I requested a magnetic board specifically to use this and my school got me both, thank you Whitefield!) The cards illustrate various concepts and words without translation. On mine, the word is there […]
premium
February 13, 2009
One of my problems with standard curriculum is they can’t provide enough variety in activities focused on one issue. They try, I’ll give the writers credit for that, but there are only so many textbook/workbook exercises you can design to elicit subjunctive for doubt. And really, do we believe that those cheesy textbook videos offer […]
premium
January 13, 2009
Internet scavenger hunts
premium
I’m constantly looking for communicative, interesting tasks for my students to either create or complete. My Spanish 2 project for the 3rd quarter is an internet scavenger-hunt-type worksheet. Students choose a Spanish-language website and then create a series of questions for another student to complete. The questions can involve playing a game, listening to music, […]
premium