SpanishPlans.org

New Tech Tools

Posted on July 11, 2011 by spanishplans

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:

Created with Spell with flickr

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 | Leave a comment

10 Spanish Freebies

Posted on July 10, 2011 by spanishplans

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 →

Posted in Free, Resources | Tagged free, teacherspayteachers | 2 Comments

Subject Pronouns

Posted on July 8, 2011 by spanishplans

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

Posted on July 6, 2011 by spanishplans

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:

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 | Leave a comment

Teaching Feelings

Posted on July 2, 2011 by spanishplans

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 →

Posted in Bulletin Boards | Tagged adjectives, emociones, estar, feelings, tener | 2 Comments

Vosotros

Posted on June 22, 2011 by spanishplans

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:

@hmwildy: I had a prof say “they only use vosotros in Spain, we won’t learn it”. What?? There are almost 46 MILLION people in Spain!!

@Chic_Educator86: I don’t explicitly teach it either, but bring it up and tell students when/where its used

@ceiligirl69: I do teach vosotros because my students are more likely to visit Spain or Latin America & 1 of those trips may be 1 with me

@hmwildy: Why not teach it? I wasn’t taught it and then went to Spain and felt like a total idiot! Wish it was taught more in the US!

@crepeaunutella: #vosotros I do because I use it when I give instructions to my classes

@zimmerja: #teamvosotros because even though it isn’t used primarily the students should know it just in case. I don’t use it orally

@crepeaunutella: My verb flowers would look bizarre with only 5 petals! :o) #vosotros

@stephgonz: always teach vosotros! i teach it because i never learned it as a student and then was beyond confused in Madrid!

@sraoconnor: I introduce vosotros but do not assess it. I did not learn it as I grew up in Mexico so it is not natural for me to use.

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

Posted on June 22, 2011 by spanishplans

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

Posted on June 18, 2011 by spanishplans

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!

Posted in Resources | Tagged El Dia E, flteach, free, spanish, Spanish Day, TpT | 1 Comment

Using Whiteboards in FL class

Posted on June 16, 2011 by spanishplans

My students love using individual mini-whiteboards. If you don’t have a class set: get one now! There are several budget-easy options. The first one, is to go to a hardware store such as Menards, Home Depot, etc. Look for a big white shower board (perhaps 8’x10′), should be about $10. Then take it and have it cut in 12″x12″ pieces. Some people have claimed getting free cutting if they mention you are a teacher.
The next one is to take page protectors and stick a piece of paper, preferably cardstock, inside.
Of course, many teaching catalogs offer cheap alternatives nowadays. You can always buy it as a department or share a class set with other teachers. Need erasers? I have seen teachers use things such as old socks, old t-shirts, or any other used fabric.

In terms of using the boards, they are several ways that allow you to quickly assess students. Besides posing a question to the class and having students write their answers, or having them translate something, here a few unique game ideas:

Give the students a vocabulary list. Have them write a Spanish word on their board. The teacher then calls out one word in English. Whoever has that word on their board should stand up. If more than one person has it, the person who stood up first earns a point.
Put students in groups of three. Give commands, such as “Escribe una verdura verde” or “Algo que comes para El Día de Acción de Gracias” or something that has multiple answers. The three students in the group are competing against each other. You can decide to award points for having a unique answer (no one else had their answer) or for matching a answer with their group (two of the three match=5 points, all three match=10 points). You can play for a specific time (probably 10 minutes) or until a group reaches a certain point level.
Building listening: Describe a scene to your students. Or have your students describe something to each other. Have partners seated across from each other and the other person must draw what is being described. Can be used for many thematic units (House, Body, Around town, School)
Example:
Spanish Body Parts Drawing for Listening
Review for quizzes and tests. The following products are good lessons that can be used with whiteboards:
-Subject Pronouns Practice
-Direct Object Pronoun Practice
–Commands and Direct Object Pronoun Practice

Oh, and don’t forget to have students bring in their own Expo dry-erase markers. If they borrow mine, I tell them they are not allowed to draw or write unnecessarily with my marker and waste the ink. If they do, I take the marker away and make them write on paper.

Posted in Games | Tagged activities, assessment, french, games, whiteboards | 3 Comments

Teachers Tweeting: Free Professional Development

Posted on June 12, 2011 by spanishplans

I’ll admit, I used to say I would never get a twitter account. I didn’t see the purpose and besides what did I have to say that would be important to anyone to read? I thought twitter was just for famous celebrities or businesses. In the 7 months since I’ve been a part of Twitter, I’ve have come to learn many things.

Twitter as a PLN
Granted, I first had to Google what exactly a “PLN” was that I kept seeing everyone mention. Well, this “Personal Learning Network” is composed of fellow teachers and educators who share tons of useful information, exciting web tools, and networking! You’ll be amazed at the number of teachers who are using twitter to network and learn.

Free Professional Development
With your own PLN, connected to hundreds of other educators, you will be able to get free professional development everyday you log in. No need to pay for those expensive workshops and conferences. I have been able to receive so much knowledge and ways to improve my teaching from twitter. The links and educational tools that teachers have shared have been amazing and I would not have found them without being connected on twitter.

Taking Advantage
Besides regular tweets, many educators participate in Twitter “chats”. By using a hashtag, a word follow by the number sign (#), you can follow conversations. Most take place on a weekly basis and topics are decided ahead of time. See a list of chats here.

Find educators who use twitter and start making connections!

For Spanish or Foreign Language specific information…. Continue reading →