Spanish 3
June 10, 2014
Have you ever stopped to think about why we teach the past tenses separately? When I first started investigating TPRS as a teaching method, a lot of things clicked with me (and some didn’t) but one of the tips that made the most sense was that it didn’t make sense to teach past tenses one at […]
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December 2, 2013
When I first set out to teach the novel La ciudad de las bestias by Isabel Allende five years ago, I wrote chapter guides for each chapter as I taught it through a year. I never dreamed that teachers far and wide would use the document I made publicly available a few years ago. […]
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May 10, 2013
E-magazines with learner appeal
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In my quest to find and review online publishing tools (i.e. sites that will organize your students’ content like a magazine or newspaper) I’ve come across quite a few online magazines designed for our primary audience – middle and high school students. You can find anything I’ve found by looking at my Delicious tags under […]
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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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August 17, 2012
2019 update: Full ebooks available As of October 2014, I made the in-depth, professionally designed ebook guide for Cajas de cartón available for sale. In the spring of 2019, the Esperanza renace guide was released. You can purchase either guide or get the guide to La ciudad de las bestias for free on my ebooks page. The ebooks improve on the […]
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March 19, 2012
Design your own final exam
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This year as I contemplated my final exam for Spanish 3, I didn’t want to do what they did last year, because I like the PhotoPeach reflection much better as a relaxing ending to AP Spanish. Since my most popular blog post ever is about student choice in homework, I thought, why not the final exam […]
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September 27, 2011
Spanish 3 assessment documents
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Sometimes I feel like I’m reinventing myself every year. Do you ever look back on something you did and think, “Why on earth did I do it that way? What a bad idea! Here we go again.” I feel like I do that every year! So even though I completely redesigned my Spanish 3 class […]
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August 18, 2011
At last I’ve turned to working on my own classes (after looking at Spanish 1 all summer for our new teacher) and I’m (once again) re-doing my Spanish 3 units. This year I’m trying to make them more realistic. I’ve been heavily influenced on this by a particular #langchat last year on making assessments authentic. […]
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January 27, 2011
Instead of the vocab quiz
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@SraSpanglish commented on my post “Kick the vocab quiz“: “I feel like I can’t do this with Spanish I, and it’s hard with Spanish II. Also, what are students graded on instead?” At this point, I only teach very early elementary, who only receive a grade of “excellent/satisfactory/needs improvement” once a quarter, and advanced students. […]
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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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August 25, 2009
I love crossover songs
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I love crossover songs. That’s what I call those songs that have so much good material in them that they’re great from Spanish 1 to AP. Fanny Lu’s new hit Tú No Eres Para Mí is one of those. It’s especially good for uses and conjugations of ser. There’s the title, which is of course […]
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