I have my very first ever student teacher!! (Well, I guess they are called 'interns' around here, but you know what I mean.) Her name is Julia, and she is super fabulous. She just spent...a long time (a semester maybe?) with an awesome French/Spanish TPRS teacher at a high school in our city, so she is very well prepared and has seen lots of great things and has tons of ideas. She will be with me for six weeks and then, Lord willing, she will be my maternity sub when I am out at the end of the year. I am excited! 
This week, we wanted to do an activity that would help her to learn the names of my 145 students. Since we haven't spent any significant amount of times with the verb 'llamarse' (to call oneself) or 'gustar' (to like) since the first week of school in Spanish A (which was...um...three years ago for my third year students!!), we settled on the old standard, "My name is Martina and I like money". (Students have to state their name and something that they like that begins with the same letter as their first name. Everyone sits in a circle, and students have to say their own name and what they like and the names and likes of everyone that has gone before them. The challenge for this activity--in lower levels, at least-is helping students to think of nouns that begin with the same letter as their names (you could use verbs, too, but I wanted to focus on nouns). We tried several different things throughout the day, and what ended up working best for us was providing students with a list of options for each letter of the alphabet. This limited the prep time to less than five minutes, whereas our other attempts left us with little time to complete the actual activity. The list that we compiled is included in the file. Use this activity to practice...
- Introducing yourself and others (llamarse)
- The verb 'gustar'
- Cognates
- The verb 'empieza' (begins)
- Using a Spanish-English dictionary
- Or simply to learn names!!
