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.

Selena - el chico del apto 512 - revised

So this is a mini-unit I like to use each year in Spanish 1. I originally got it from Martina Bex years ago as I mention here (from 5 years ago!) and it has evolved over the years to use whatever words I have needed at the moment.

I love how I can incorporate music and also tell a story. This story by Martina actually has inspired me to use other songs to make into storylines. Of course one of my all time favorites each year in Spanish 1 is: Fanny Lu - Celos.  I've also done the same with Sr. Wooly's awesome song: Puedo ir al baño (this year's version).

See this year's activities here for Spanish 1 for "Celos".

So back to "el chico del apartamento 512". It's a song by Selena that has a cute little story about a girl who keeps having guys want to talk to her and she isn't interested. Finally she sees a guy come out of the elevator and he's the man of her dreams!

We listen to the song for a few days as a warm up with different activities to interact with the song in different ways, which preps them for the second week and the actual story that is adapted from the song, thanks to Martina.  I made a powerpoint of it and this year pushed way more language.

I made an embedded reading of about 3 versions or so. If you see phrases in there that aren't in my structures, it's because I had previously used those at some point and was recycling them back in to remind my students of them for additional help binding them to long-term memory.

Here's my basic plan that took about 2 weeks!  Of course remember I also a few other activities in class so we might do the TPR / storytelling part for 25-30 minutes a period. Best of luck if you use it!

It's usually a pretty big hit with my students since there is the music component as well as the compelling story of love and mystery. I am excited that this will build up nicely towards the last story of the year. I am going to adapt Kara Jacob's AWESOME song choice from first semester this year: "Soy Yo" by Bomba Estéreo.

And here's the Selena song if you've somehow never heard it!

Lots of Spanish 1 TPRS resources

So after the relative success of my last post about what I did with the commercial: "Me voy de casa", I decided to go ahead and share a majority of things that I did last year in my Spanish 1 classes.

Feel free to open the folder, download things to your Google Drive or to your computer and enjoy!

My hope is that you can find a new activity or a new spin on an old activity you have used. Or maybe something to inspire you as you try out more communicative-based teaching via TPRS or Comprehensible Input methods!

I tried to include a plethora of things to give you an idea of what you could do in your classes as well to push kids towards proficiency by de-emphasizing grammar in actual grammar lessons each day (Don't worry, I, Señor Jordan, still teach grammar to my kids. But it's more of a back-door approach!)

Let me know what you think and happy perusing!

So click here to see my google drive folder (minus Agentes Secretos stuff since some of that has images from the teacher's guide by the very talented Mira Canion).

*Disclaimer* Please don't judge me too much for how I might have done an activity. I am far from an expert on teaching via TPRS. But I figure the best way to get better is to share with others who might be farther back on the path to encourage them and maybe the more experienced people can offer a suggestion or two!

TPRS resources

Just found this! Looks like a goldmine! Looks like I'll have a lot of reading this summer!

https://tprsteacher.wordpress.com/tprs-handouts/

Music - using songs more than once

I got this idea from Kristy Placido in an online conference through tprspublishing a few years back.

Basically I used to just show a song for one day of the week and we would listen to it and do a cloze activity. It was the favorite day of a lot of my students.  We would go over the lyrics and listen to it various times. But there was never really much of an extension activity.

I don't see a huge problem since my most important goal was to expose them to new things. The songs could have similar and/or different perspectives and we could have a quick talk in L1 or TL about them as needed. Since storytelling revolves around high frequency structures, this is a great activity since many songs will have some part with comprehensible language that we can see later creep up in stories.

I also noticed many of the kids downloaded the songs that year.