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Summer Savings
The end of summer is becoming more and more of a reality. As the summer winds down, it’s time for teachers to start thinking about getting ready for the new school year. Getting your classroom ready and buying supplies can be a huge burden, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are 6 ways to save you money, including many free giveaways for teachers:
1. Teacher Appreciation Giveaways
Usually middle to late August, supply stores such as Staples, Office Max, Office Depot, and Walmart have special events for teachers on a designated Saturday morning where they offer free coffee, juice, breakfast snacks, and supply giveaways. In addition to coupons, you might receive free classroom supplies such as post-its, pencils or pens, paper clips, and more. Call your local office supply store and ask what date their “Teacher Appreciation” day is.
2. Dollar Tree
Dollar Tree has a great education section for teachers. Stock up on Stickers, Cut-outs, Posters, Passes, curriculum specific items, as well as any office supplies, all for $1.
But why stop at the teacher’s section? I buy wrapping paper and colored plastic tablecloths to cover my bulletin boards! Super easy background!
3. Garage Sales
Garage sales are a great place to buy items such as Board Games for as low as 50 cents to up to $2-3. Spanish teachers, specifically, can be on the look for Guess Who?, a great game to practice descriptions in Spanish. You might come across some other useful items such as organizational crates and manipulatives that you can incorporate into your classroom.
4. Party Stores
Looking for decoration ideas? Check out your local Party stores for themed decorations. Spanish teachers, specifically, can find Mexican-related decorum in the “Fiesta” section. Yes, some are very stereotypical, but if want to spice up your classroom walls, I suggest the Mariachi scene setter.
5. Target Dollar Bins
Who doesn’t love shopping at Target? During back to school shopping, don’t forget to take a look in the Dollar Bins at the front of the store. Many great incentives for students, such as stickers, pencils, erasers, as well as other items for teachers are a great find, and a great deal!
6. Teacher Created Resources
If you are a new teacher, or are just looking for new ideas to make that boring lesson more engaging, check out thousands of teacher-created lesson plans and resources available online. TeachersPayTeachers is a great network where teachers can buy and sell their work. You will be saving so much in comparison to buying through teaching catalogs. Besides, many teachers offer sales this time of year as well, and the site itself is hosting a back-to-school sale starting August 1, with 10% off your purchases. Combine that with the discounts that many sellers offer, and you could save up to 30%! If you are looking for Spanish resources, check out our catalog, and if you don’t have a free account at TpT yet, be sure to sign up now. You will also find thousands of FREE items on this site to download as well. Who doesn’t love free?
Don’t forget to check the local advertisements from your newspaper too. See which stores are offering sales. Don’t forget to carry your Teacher ID with you, as many stores will allow you to buy more than the limit on these sales! Good luck shopping!
New Tech Tools
Have you checked out our Tech Tools sqworl? We have 17 (and growing) websites that you can incorporate into your classroom with these Web2.o Tools.
We’d like to feature a few of them today:
Spell with Flickr: Type a word into the box, and watch as pictures of the letters appear in order, giving you a nice tile spelling. Would be great for spelling new vocabulary words. We created a picture for each “Spanish” and “Plans”, took a snapshot and then put them together in Word, before taking another snapshot. Here’s our result:
TimerTab: This web-based timer, allows you to set a countdown, use as a stopwatch, or an alarm, while continuing to use the Internet with other tabs open and still display the time in the tab at the top of the window. You can be working on a website and see in the window how much time is left or how long you have been doing that activity. Here’s an example of our open tabs, and the time shown in the last tab.
Newspaper Map: 10000+ online newspapers all over the world. Shown on a world map, color coded by language. Click the bubble for more information, including a direct link to that newspaper’s website. Authentic Resources from around the globe!
Sqworl: When you bookmark your favorite websites, why limit yourself to just a link? Why not a visual? By checking out our Tech Tools, or Spanish Education sqworls, you know what a sqworl is. But how easy is it to add a site to your sqworl. Simply drag the Sqworl Bookmarklet to your toolbar and instantly add any site you are on. When you are on a site, click the button, fill in a short description, and click add url. Keeps you on the same window.
Hope you find these teaching tools useful! Know of any Web2.0 Tools that teachers and educators can benefit from? Give us the link in the comments section and we will add them to our sqworl!
Posted in Web2.0 Technology
Tagged flickr, newspapers, sqworl, tech, timer tab, web2.0
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10 Spanish Freebies
Great ready for back to school with our featured 10 Free Spanish items for your classroom! These 10 items are ready to use, or can be modified to fit your own classroom’s needs. To download these items, all you need is a free TpT login, a teacher’s best friend.
- Spanish Flashcards for verb forms by Micki Fitzpatrick
- Present Tense Speaking Prompts PowerPoint by The Enlightened Elephant
- Tic-Tac-Toe Vocabulary Game by The Enlightened Elephant
- Hidden Picture by TeacherMichelle
- Estar with prepositions guessing activity by Danielle
- Templo Game for beginning unit by LaProfesora
- Spanish Speaking Countries Flags by: Amanda Ewoldt
- Practice for Nationalities by Maria Morrison
- Adjectives of Descriptions PP by Todd Claybaugh
- Escuela Sudoku by Deb Blaz
For more Spanish items for your classroom, check out our catalog. For more free items…. Continue reading
Subject Pronouns
The Achilles heel of Spanish class. Don’t know your subject pronouns and you won’t be able to conjugate that verb. A topic that students MUST understand and master if they are to have any success the rest of the year. When I used to teach this topic, I was surprised at how difficult it was for the students. In teaching the grammar of this foreign language, it was evident students were not masters of the topic in English. Because of its important, I make my students retake the quiz until they get an A on it. It is something they need to understand and must know before they can move on to more advanced topics.
Now, when my students get to me, I still find a few that are not sure the difference between ellos and ustedes, or even tú and usted.
Posted above my whiteboard, I have this graphic organizer that I reference whenever a student makes a mistake with a subject pronoun. 
With this, they can see that if I am talking about “Yo” and I add 1 or more people it becomes the plural “nosotros” or “nosotras”. And that the plural of “tú” and “usted” is “ustedes”.
For lesson plans about Subject Pronouns…. Continue reading
Posted in Bulletin Boards, Lesson Plans
Tagged graphic organizers, pronombres, subject pronouns
2 Comments
SevenSevenEleven Sale
It’s your lucky day! On this 7-7-11, we are offering special prices for today only! To get you ready for the new school year, we are offering some of our favorite Spanish resources at a big discount for you.
If you do not have a teacherspayteachers account, get one for FREE to begin your shopping.
Our first sale item, is our Conversation Cards for Second Level Spanish: Over 165 questions to get your students speaking. Makes a great communicative activity as a lesson or to pull out whenever you have a few minutes left at the end of class for a question and answer session.
Sale: $7.11
Our next product, La Ropa: Clothing Unit, features 9 different files for the clothing unit, including a powerpoint, worksheets, project, storytelling, and assessment. Normally $10 dollars, this product is now being offered at the low price of $7.07 for this ready to use lesson.
$7.07
Our last item is a PowerPoint of activities for use with the past tense. This Preterite Practice Powerpoint contains 8 slides and normally sells for $3.00. For today only, we are offering this product for FREE! Act quickly!
FREE
To make things even better, if you leave us feedback/rating on the item you downloaded, we will send you one of the following free:
- Adjetivos posesivos
- Body Parts Spanish Memory Game
- Stem Change Verb Packet
- Commands and Direct Object Pronoun Practice Powerpoint
- Canciones Songs for Spanish Bell Work
To get the free file, become a fan of our facebook page, make a comment on the status announcing this sale, telling us which item you rated, and which of the 5 files you would like for free.
Posted in Uncategorized
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Teaching Feelings
When teaching adjectives with estar for feelings, I take advantage of an “Emociones” poster, which the students love. I give each student a post-it note and have them write their name on it. They then stick it to the picture and word of how they are feeling that day.
I also like to introduce these feelings during the school unit. This way we can incorporate how students feel during specific situations. Maybe because of an upcoming test, they are feeling nervioso, or are confundido about their science lesson, or enojado with all their homework. There are so many possibilities to use these feeling words in context.
For our guided notes packet of teaching feelings….. Continue reading
Vosotros
Zachary Jones @ZJonesSpanish, brought up an interesting debate on twitter, by asking if fellow Spanish teachers teach vosotros and why or why not.
Some responses given:
Personally, I do NOT teach vosotros in my Spanish class. Let me point out that I teach in Chicagoland, which is in the middle of the United States of America. If was teaching Spanish to students in England or Germany, it would make more sense to teach it. However in the U.S. it does not seem to be relevant. According to US Census data from 2010, below are the numbers of Hispanics in the US:
Click to Enlarge
According to this information there are 50,477,594 people of Hispanic origin in the US. We can also see that 63% are Mexican, 9% Puerto Rican, 7.9% Central American, 5.5 South American, and just 1.3% Spanish.
Again, let me repeat that last number. 1.3% of Hispanics are actually Spaniards, or just 635,253 out of over 50 million. For me, the actual purpose of our programs are for our students to be able to communicate in the target language. Hopefully, they will continue to study and become fluent and maybe even use it in their job one day.
To teach our students to use vosotros is not natural. It would be extremely uncommon for them to come across its use in the United States. The 98.7% of people they encounter do not use vosotros. The rest of the world does not use vosotros and many native speakers continue to mock the Spanish for their lisp and use of vosotros.
I have traveled to Spain. Did I use vosotros? No. Did I understand when the natives used vosotros? Yes.
I have traveled to Latin America. Did I use vosotros? No. Did anyone use vosotros? No. But what they did use is “vos”, which is something many teachers who teach vosotros fail to even recognize. They have such a “Eurobession” that they ignore the majority of the Spanish speaking world. But the discussion on “vos” will be for another day…
Let me finalize this by putting it into an analogy. Teaching vosotros in the United States is like teaching our ESL/ELL students to speak the British English.
So, the question remains… Is vosotros an important item for middle and high school students to learn in their Spanish class?
Would love to hear your thoughts on the subject in the comments!
Posted in Discussion/Methodology
Tagged flteach, Hispanics, spain, spanish, teaching, US Census, vosotros
10 Comments
Tiras Comicas en español
We’ve talked before about having students create their own comic strips and useful websites to make them, but today we are talking about actual comics that you can use in your classroom.
I love finding comic strips that deal with the current vocabulary theme or grammar concept we are currently working on. I’ve collected numerous comics over the years, as I receive a comic in my inbox daily from gocomics.com. Did you know they had comics in Spanish? My favorite is the authentic Condorito, but I do enjoy a good Ziggy too. Here are some examples that you can introduce to your class; it’s a good way to build a connection with your students, too.
During Health Unit
For more comics and ways to use them in your classroom… Continue reading
Posted in Bulletin Boards, Web2.0 Technology
Tagged chistes, comics, Condorito, tiras comicas, Ziggy
2 Comments
Happy Spanish Day
We are celebrating El Día E with some free items today!! El Día E, la fiesta de todos los que hablamos español, is today, June 18. Read more about Spanish Day from the Instituto Cervantes.
To celebrate we are offering two FREE products today. To download these free items, all you need is a TpT account. If you don’t already have one, register for a TeachersPayTeachers account. Don’t worry; it’s free and they won’t sell your e-mail address. If you sign up today through the link above, and post a message on our Facebook, we will also give you a $5 product of your choice, FREE!
The following items are free today until Monday, June 20th. Don’t miss out on these great resources that will come in handy during August and September!
SpanishPlans.org 