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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 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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November 11, 2010
This year I noticed that my AP Spanish (4th year at my school) class had a lower listening proficiency than my previous class. As I reflected on possible causes for this, I realized that since I’d moved classrooms into a room without a VCR and thus stopped moving slowly through tapes of prior years’ Latin […]
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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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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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January 28, 2010
Imperfect and preterite are terms you will almost never hear in my classroom. Instead, when we focus on narrating in the past, we use phrases like descriptive past and sudden past. In my opinion, that’s the best way in my opinion to contrast them. The trick with putting them together is to get students to use one when they’re […]
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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 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 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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October 26, 2009
David Bisbal’s YouTube channel
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David Bisbal is all over the music news lately for his whirlwind promotion of his new album, Sin Mirar Atrás (and it doesn’t hurt that his esposa Elena is expecting a little princesita). To stay up-to-date on what he’s doing these days, follow him on Twitter @davidbisbal and check out his muy chévere YouTube channel. […]
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