If you are or are striving to become a TCI teacher and are using a textbook, you are not alone! There are scores of master TCI teachers that, for need or want, still work from a textbook. My favorite story is that Mira Canion knows Realidades so well that you can tell her any word in Spanish and she will tell you in which chapter of Realidades it is introduced. At ACTFL this year, I found out that Kelly Ferguson has the same talent! They got into a friendly debate about the word that I gave them because of when it first appears vs. is explicitly taught. Some teachers do not want to or are not ready to abandon the textbook, while others stick with it because of district requirements. If you find yourself tied to a text and are unsure how to make it work with TPRS® and other CI strategies, check out the series from Keith Toda that begins with this post. I've written about it here, and here is a post with some great tips from Mira's presentation at CSCTFL last year.
I get a lot of questions about using my curriculum with textbooks. Honestly, it's not easy! I've posted before about how to pair my units and resources with Realidades 1 and Avancemos 1, but the sequencing and timing is too different to work through both simultaneously. The purpose of this post is to help out teachers using the Realidades 2 curriculum that want to use my Level II units to do so. My Level II curriculum is a little easier to align with Realidades than is my Level I curriculum, because each unit targets a specific grammar point. My Spanish II units are also shorter than my Level I units, so it is easier to use them AND activities from the book, if needed. Essentially, class time spent on my CI based units would end up replacing the class time spent doing grammar drills and other explicit 'learning' of each grammar point. If you must work through the Realidades 2 curriculum in order, you can certainly rearrange my units in order to do so, but beware that you might need to do some additional prep or provide addition translations throughout the unit due to the presence of structures that were skipped. The first few units of Realidades 2 tackle present tense grammar constructions, and you can use units from my Level 1 curriculum to target them with comprehensible input. Before the first chapter that works with the preterite tense (Chapter 2B), however, I'd recommend teaching the three lessons in Unit 1 of my Level II curriculum so that students have a solid base of high frequency structures that will help them to understand the units that follow. If you are not required to work through the Realidades units in order, then you should have no trouble following my Level II curriculum and doing additional lessons here and there to make your students learn the RIDICULOUS amounts of vocabulary and additional grammar points expected of them.
All that said, I put together this document to help you match my units and lessons with the Realidades 2 curriculum. Hope it's helpful!
Find this clickable PDF in the Subscriber Library: Administrative Items folder » Textbook Alignment folder
