Día 101 - decorations

So I always love decorating my classroom.  It's funny.  I'm really not a very good interior decorator.  But the Spanish classroom can be a place where bright and tacky is acceptable because the idea is to bombard the students with language.

I have purchased some different decorations (moreso my first year).  In general though, I try to make them these days because I don't really like the decorations that are mass produced.  They don't really mean much to me.  But I have the typical days of the week, months, colors, emotions and a few posters from teachersdiscovery.com

I also have some different things I have acquired through traveling or that people have given to me from different countries.  I like those because they're more authentic.


My goal has always been to give them something purposeful to zone out on.

Interrogatives:
I made some of the question words with bright colors as posters a few years back without realizing how easily I can incorporate them into TPRS.  It's kind of funny how that just worked out.

Numbers
I also have a number wall where I have in brightly colored paper the numbers from 0-1000 (skipping 10s and 100s).  This way students can just use the number they want to and we can learn them that way.  It's nice.

Prepositions:
After reading someone else's blog (I think), I also decided to have a list on the wall of common prepositions in Spanish with their English translation.  It's on boring yellow paper but I tried to make it a little more colorful with different colors for the words.  It has been incredibly useful for circling in stories and I can give a brain break to the students by walking over to the poster slowly and build a little more interest while I go point to a word on their.

Places:
Last year at school we had this nice colored laser printer.  I printed out a bunch of different pictures of places for a unit in Spanish one to learn some different places (movie theater, pool, restaurant, etc).  I laminated them and labeled them underneath this year and placed them all over the room to have a way to bring that vocabulary into the stories whenever possible.

'Can I' QuestionsThese are just for the kids to have in general to leave the classroom.  I pretend like I don't understand them if they try to leave without asking in Spanish.  Of course... Can I... go to the bathroom/nurse/office/locker... etc.

Papel Picado
In previous years, I had students make 'papel picado' for Day of the Dead.  I loved hanging them up at the top of the classroom because it brightened the classroom so much to have them in there.  But this year I kind of forgot about Day of the Dead while being so pumped about this new teaching method.  It's always good to have student work posted.  I need to make more little decoration projects for my kids... even a little praise wall where I post exemplary work from different students.

Personal Pronouns
So I was really excited last year about this poster that I made.  It it's pretty straightforward.  I decided to design the personal pronouns in Spanish (you know... like "I" "you" etc).  But I illustrated it so that it could be a graphical representation for the visually stimulated.  If you'd be interested in seeing it, I have the original copy and I think I have the divided up version so you can print the different parts of it and tape them together like I had to.  Then I laminated it. 

I probably shouldn't just leave a link because the images are provided by pixton.com.


The Thinker
I'm probably the most excited about my most recent addition to the classroom....

I noticed that it was hard to incorporate the phrase "creo que" a lot into class but I thought it was useful and fun.  So I found a cartoony picture of the 'thinker' statue and colored it.  I then made a thought bubble and wrote in big letters "Creo que..." (I think...).  I laminated it and hung it up on my wall.  Now I can hang up a different ending each week to what he's thinking about.  It's a great opportunity to incorporate vocabulary and students are able to try and guess the meaning.  So far he's thought his pants were in the microwave and this week he thinks the leprechauns stole his underwear.  But I'm excited about the opportunities to change it each week for my kids to figure out on their own.

Lastly, I made a little poster for myself with a quote that is to remind me to be more positive... I got it out of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People

I shall pass this way but once, any good therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now.  Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.