songs
July 6, 2011
A song made for early Spanish 1
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Last week Luis Fonsi‘s new album Tierra Firme came out – and it’s good. It’s worth the whole download, I promise. The Deluxe version came with the video for Gritar, as well as acoustic and ranchero versions of that fabulous song. As I was listening, this song called “Me gustas tú” came on. The more […]
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May 23, 2011
Combat the ‘este tiempo’ monster
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photo by Xiang Xi I don’t know about you, but my students even in their third and fourth years will slip into phases where they keep saying or writing ‘este tiempo’ instead of ‘esta vez.’ Or, un otro tiempo or más tiempos or el último tiempo. Here are a couple of songs to combat that […]
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February 23, 2011
photo by Jorge Mejía Peralta Sra. Birch commented on this post adding my lyrics file to Google docs, offering a link to her awesome wiki that has a link to her spreadsheet of music. It’s an amazing store of music categorized by singer, title, grammar focus, and other info, including YouTube links. It’s cool enough […]
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January 26, 2011
@lisajmch asked on Twitter this week about good activities for stem-changing verbs and my mind immediately went to a blog post I thought I’d made about a song with repetitions of ‘puedo,’ and again, it turned out it was in the dashboard and not written or published. So here goes. I feel like a broken […]
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January 15, 2011
Somewhere in Spanish 1 or 2 there usually comes up a unit that has something to do with health. I even have a unit in my AP course (with units I wrote myself) called “Cuidándo a mí” with health-related issues. In your Spanish health-related unit you really ought to include the song “Bilirrubina” por Juan […]
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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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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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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 17, 2009
My students are insanely excited about the release of Camila’s sophomore album. Several of them can sing “Solo para ti” or “Coleccionista de canciones” or “Abrázame” from memory. The first single from the album, “Mientes,” will be released next week on the 24th. Meanwhile, you can hear the whole amazing song on their YouTube channel […]
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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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