grammar
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three years ago I finally obeyed the inner voice that was yelling at me that textbooks were terribly unmotivating and out-of-date as soon as they were printed and we closed our textbooks forever and haven’t looked back, in Spanish 1 through 3 anyway (we do use a workbook some in AP to get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 […]
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July 15, 2010
A tweet from @samocamila, he’s just full of fun stuff these days: A todos los fans les mando un besote!!!, tengo mucha emoción por cantar para ustedes esta noche en premios juventud, los amo!. Úsalo para practicar la diferencia entre por y para, y no te pierdas la oportunidad de enfocarse a los estudiantes en […]
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April 13, 2010
My baby’s been occupying a whole lot of my time lately, draining the life from my blogging and twittering, but in the grand scheme of priorities, she’s above my blog, sorry. 😉 But now that potty training is going more smoothly I’ll make a concerted effort to get back into things. Way too long ago […]
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April 3, 2010
I found a recent broadcast from Radio ONU (incidentally a great source for AP Spanish audio) that uses several verbs in the future tense because it’s about a future meeting of a group discussing what they want to do about the H1N1 virus. Current event + grammar = :o) My favorite thing to do with […]
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January 28, 2010
Imperfect and preterite are terms you will almost never hear in my classroom. Instead, when we focus on narrating in the past, we use phrases like descriptive past and sudden past. In my opinion, that’s the best way in my opinion to contrast them. The trick with putting them together is to get students to use one when they’re […]
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January 19, 2010
Past subjunctive is not the easiest thing to find in a song, much less several repetitions of it. I blogged a bit about a couple of songs that do it, but I this song just crossed my radar and wow, what a gem for past subjunctive. It has 17 verbs in the past subjunctive, 8 […]
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December 11, 2009
The winner of the Latin Grammy for Mejor Nuevo Artista this year, and nominated in a similar category for Premio Lo Nuestro 2010, is a blond, dimpled native of D.F. named Alexander Acha. One of his most popular tunes is the song “Te Amo.” I had to tell my students to give him a chance […]
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November 21, 2009
Voy + a + infinitive is a fun construction because it gives students the ability to talk about the future without too much trouble. It’s also fun to teach through music because there are several good songs for it. The first is ‘Irreemplazable‘ by Beyonce, always fun because the students know the English version. It […]
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November 19, 2009
It’s 19 de noviembre!
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http://media.imeem.com/m/X1eVzvIJMO/aus=false/ 19 De Noviembre – Carlos Vives Take advantage of today’s date to play Carlos Vives’ song 19 de noviembre. Here are some ways to use it: Listening: -See if they can hear the date at the beginning without seeing it (Spanish 1). Culture: -Tell students to look under “Historia” in this article to see […]
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November 10, 2009
November seems to be kind of a popular topic for songs. Celebrate this oddity by playing a couple of songs, starting with Noviembre sin ti by Reik, winners of this year’s Latin Grammy for best albúm pop vocal grupo o duo. The things I like to point out in this song are: –weather/environment vocabulary –nosotros […]
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November 7, 2009
Zachary Jones’s “Clozeline”
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Don’t re-invent the wheel-often there are magically appealing and effective activities out there on the web if you just know where to look. I just got a link over Twitter to Zachary Jones‘s post about his activity called “Clozeline.” He’s got cloze quizzes to a whole bunch of songs, with grammatical topics. Enjoy!
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November 4, 2009
The word ojalá finds its roots in Arabic, meaning “May allah grant that.” In Spanish it’s always followed by subjunctive, and here are two songs to help work with that. The first is with present, Ojalá que llueva café, by Juan Luis Guerra. It’s one of those songs that can lead you in a hundred different […]
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