All my Spanish 2016-17 resources

Ok, so I like to be transparent with my teaching.

I am not perfect and don't claim to be. For me it's about the journey and wonder of learning the language in pieces with my students.

This year went well considering the following challenges:

• Spanish 2 students were all over the place in ability when they got to my class
• Spanish 1 students were those who
• transferred into school system
• didn't get good enough grades to take Spanish 1 in middle school
• students who had previously failed Spanish 1
• my going back to 50 minute periods after 3 years of 90 minute every other day block
• being at a new school (zero street cred)
• new district mandated curriculum ("cough textbook chapters cough")

Don't get me wrong, there were also SO many positives.

• supportive school department (TPRS lovers)
• lots of collaboration
• administrative support and faith in my abilities
• students slowly being won over
• trying a lot of new things
• not HAVING to teach curriculum based on a weekly map
• teach towards final

Sufficed to say, I think I got my students to buy into the method and to learn about one another and Spanish at the same time. There were ups and downs (like every year). But in general I thought my students rose to the occasion and many of them couldn't believe how much they were speaking in Spanish by the end of the year in both levels! 

• Here's what I did in Spanish 1 + hyperlinks galore.
• NOW available in FRENCH (translated by Bess Hayles for her classes).
• And here's what I did for Spanish 2 + hyperlinks galore.

Feel free to look, copy things into your own google drive to use,  let me know if you have further questions. My finals were district mandated so I have not included those.

Foreign language and wordless comics

*Edit* Maybe I should sell this idea as a "brand new method" called "ComicTalk". Could I make millions?

My memory is a little foggy on this one, but I remember hearing once about a language (foreign or language arts?) teacher that taught a class with a book that had no words, but was a series of pictures.

That would be a great idea (at least in my opinion) because each level you would add richer and richer language.

Last year, when I taught multiple levels, I was able to do the same thing with some comics I have found called "buni-comics".  They are a bit dark at times (and you definitely couldn't show some of them to your class). But the best part is that they often have a strange turn of events for the main character and they have few to no words!

Your ability to sell the comic is entirely up to you and making it comprehensible for the kids.  In the low levels, I try to tell a short story (with words we know to review) and have the kids try to guess (in the language) what might happen next.

In the higher levels, you could ask them to put themselves in the shoes of the character. Or you could ask them what should he do... or what will he do... or would you do that, etc.

Why do I bring this up now?

Well, maybe it's the mixture of students I have this year, but today when my students remembered that Thursdays we had a comic to look at (see template post to see how I pace it in my class),  they got incredibly excited!  Before I even showed the comic, they I could already see the anticipation building on their faces. And the comic delivered.

Good engagement, fun mini-discussion.

Templates for additional activities

First semester flew by and I wasn't able to get into the rhythm that I like to create until this semester since we were still using the first 10-15 minutes of class interviewing a student (very basically about one thing they like to do) until we finished talking about everyone.

But I like to establish a routine with some additional activities. I'm only doing Spanish 1 this year, but these activities worked for other levels because you can always use more language when reacting or describing whatever it may be. And these are great to get into class mode.

Often times I pick something because it relates (well or loosely) to some words we have been going over or I simply find it hilarious and need to share it but find a way to get the high frequency words in there.

Here is what I ended up on. Since we only meet every other day (due to block scheduling), I really will only do this 10 or so times each. The thing I enjoy is I can often do some different passes of old words and/or add some enrichment vocab (for those quick kids who want more vocab) and sometimes (if appropriate) I can do some pop-up grammar.

Every day: 

• Daily report (today is) - on board
• How is everyone? - Talk in Spanish about them for 5 minutes, ask follow up questions as appropriate
• Weather report (clip off weather from espanol.weather.com) TEMPLATE

Then I also will do an additional warm up activity.