vocabulary
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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October 1, 2010
Want to guide your advanced students through a culturally-relevant novel by a Hispanic author, written specifically to adolescents? Good! Intensive reading for pleasure is the best way to acquire vocabulary in any language. I’ve put an incredible amount of work into writing reading guides and vocabulary lists for all 20 chapters of Ciudad de las […]
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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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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three years ago I finally obeyed the inner voice that was yelling at me that textbooks were terribly unmotivating and out-of-date as soon as they were printed and we closed our textbooks forever and haven’t looked back, in Spanish 1 through 3 anyway (we do use a workbook some in AP to get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 10, 2010
Getting vocabulary from a tweet
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You never know what you’re going to pick up from following tweets from pop culture icons like @jesseyjoy or @juanes, or from news sources like Venezuela’s version of Fox News @globovision or Honduran @diariolaprensa. A great tweet came through today as an example. One of my favorite groups, the Mexican trio Camila, tweets mainly through […]
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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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April 6, 2009
Useless grammar I used to teach
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There are a couple of grammar issues I used to teach and I’ve since decided such explicit instruction on these points is a waste of time. By this, I mean that given the time we have with our students, and what they’re really capable of using in fluent speech/writing, explaining the grammatical terms and issues […]
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March 16, 2009
Want to make your students feel better about their Spanish? Show them this clip (or part of it, if you need to avoid certain clothing issues b/c of your class makeup). The reality competition “Nuestra Belleza Latina” just kicked off 5 participants because they failed a dictation test. The part where the girl says that […]
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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) […]
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February 19, 2009
A product I love
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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 […]
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February 17, 2009
If you have a way to project a webpage somewhere in your room, you’ve got to check out es.barbie.com. We did this in Spanish 1 today to practice house vocabulary, but you could use it for so many things. We also did the makeover part of it to practice colors. It’s amazing how much they […]
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January 13, 2009
An example of vocab
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Here’s an example of how I present my vocab. Here are the first three weeks of vocab for Spanish 1 this semester. I never give more than 15 phrases per week, and I don’t like giving even that much, but in Spanish 1 especially it’s hard to avoid that–they just flat out need the vocabulary. […]
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