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September 1, 2017
Can you give me a hand up on this soapbox for a minute? I’ll be here just a moment, and then we’ll move on, I promise. It’s all well and good to march for women’s rights and hold signs about men telling me what to do, but when it’s a sexy Latin man with a crazy […]
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December 8, 2016
It’s December and time to look back at the best of 2016 on the Musicuentos blog! If you missed some posts, never fear – here we begin the top five of what posts people found worthy to read this year. The fifth most popular post of 2016 was published as part of #Authres August and […]
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January 26, 2016
I love networking with great people. Not only is it how I figure out answers to what I’m doing wrong, it’s also where I get the best tips on new tech tools that will simplify my life without further stressing me out. This tool is a great example. I was talking to Thomas Sauer at […]
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March 28, 2015
Ever feel behind the times? I just caught the current #1 song on Latin Billboard and it struck me as having two golden ingredients for a good class song: high student appeal and a couple of high frequency structures repeated. (Though I wanted to say, Dude – she moved on, she’s happy, get over it! […]
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September 5, 2013
The most popular Latin pop song in the country has NOVICE written all over it. The song is called “Voy a vivir” by Marc Anthony. The chorus is a catchy, feel-good, novice-level message: Voy a reír, voy a bailar Vivir mi vida lalalalá Voy a reír, voy a gozar Vivir mi vida lalalalá This song […]
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May 23, 2013
Every once in a while in my class we took a few days to explore a particular grammar point, because let’s face it – sometimes it’s useful to sit down and examine something quickly so we can move on to the real communicative stuff and maybe put it into practice faster than we would have […]
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May 4, 2013
Every once in a while there comes along an authentic resource that’s the golden trifecta, the perfect mix of pop culture, TL culture, and usability for any level of language learning. The Pin Pon clip in Shrek is one of those. It’s so good that I feel inclined to repost it to give it to […]
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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 13, 2012
I posted a long time ago (like, three years ago) about this video from tu.tv, El Abecedario, spoofing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Well, it turned out the site was blocked at my school, and then with the move to the new site all my embedded YouTube videos broke, and while going through those […]
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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 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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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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