vocabulary
August 20, 2012
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Whether you’re beginning to dabble outside the textbook or you kicked it out a long time ago, one of your greatest resources will certainly be the wealth of authentic material on the internet. From shopping malls to gaming, your students can interact with a seemingly infinite variety of engaging materials. If you do a food […]
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July 20, 2012
More uses for Amor de mi tierra
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I wrote about the Carlos Vives song “Amor de mi tierra” in this post about songs with repetitions of voy + a. Here are a few more things you can do with the song: There’s only one unique occurrence of this subjunctive for influence, but it’s a nice line and it’s repeated: Quiero que lleves en ti la […]
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July 13, 2012
Songs for ‘duele’
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Using the phrase me duele is an important part of any health unit, which usually consists of exercises intended to help students explain how they’re feeling. I’ve seen a lot of assessments that involve being able to go to a doctor and talk to him about what’s wrong. With that in mind, here are five great […]
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July 5, 2012
Got idioms?
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If you’ve taught language for any length of time, you know that the more students map their English onto their second language, the more garbled their production can get, and the more frustrated everyone involved can get. They think they can do a lot because they’re spouting a lot of words, but the way the […]
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October 24, 2011
Not your average health unit
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A unit on health is common in Spanish class. We have a unit in Spanish 2 on describing ailments and visiting the doctor. Then in AP I have a unit called “Cuidándome a mí” (taking care of myself). It’s useful -last year’s AP essay was health-related- but for AP I wanted to go beyond the […]
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September 1, 2011
Myth #6: Memorizing vocabulary
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For my original post about the myths, look here. Myth #6 is this: Students learn vocabulary in long lists of isolated words (or, we just went over bosque, why can’t they remember it and remember it’s masculine?). What a mistake I used to make, and textbooks make. To think that we can give students a […]
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August 16, 2011
Jumping on the Animoto bandwagon
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I’ve heard a lot about Animoto but it’s always been filed away in that “I’m sure it’s great, but I’m on technology overload here” part of my brain. This week I decided to finally jump in and make one. If you stick with the basic account, it’s more than mildly annoying that you can’t do […]
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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 10, 2011
Tonight’s #Langchat topic is using games to support instruction. I have no idea how to describe a game in 140 characters so I thought I’d post it here. This is a game good for low levels. It works great to reinforce describing people. It’s useful for students to have the verbs ‘have’ ‘wear’ and ‘is.’ […]
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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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January 25, 2011
Ah, the vocab quiz, I remember them well. I used to have all my students do what I had to do in college- put all the new vocab on spiral-bound 3×5 cards, English on front, Spanish on back. I would drill myself and drill myself for that dreaded weekly (or whenever) vocab quiz, the one […]
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January 19, 2011
Low-level vocabulary, motivating subject matter, absolutely up-to-date… tell me again why we aren’t using authentic materials in the low levels?
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