For the last three years, Spanish students have been able to follow the top stories from the Spanish-speaking world in El mundo en tus manos. Each week, Maris Hawkins and I identify important and interesting current events and write up comprehensible summaries so that beginning language learners can understand.
As we prepare for the 2019-2020 subscription, we are making some BIG changes that will allow even more students to access this valuable resource.
UPDATE: The 2019-2020 subscription has ended, and we are now preparing for 2020-2021.
What is El mundo en tus manos?
EL MUNDO EN TUS MANOS is a news publication that provides comprehensible news summaries from Spanish speaking countries to students. It is a collaboration between Maris Hawkins and Martina Bex. The target reader for this publication is a student in his or her first to third year of Spanish. Publication began in March of 2016, and subscribers incorporate this resource into their instruction in a variety of ways. Click here or here for some ideas!
What can I expect from the 2019-2020 subscription?
Because we are making some big changes for the coming subscription, read through each one carefully then download the FREE preview issue to get a feel for what the issues will really be like! We are confident that the changes will open up new opportunities for you to connect your students with people, places, and perspectives from Spanish speaking cultures.
Three versions of each article
Making a news story comprehensible goes far beyond sheltering vocabulary. Often, news stories that appear in major news publications assume a certain amount of background knowledge, based on the background knowledge of the reader. For example, an article might be about an event that happened in "CDMX" and share how "AMLO" responded to it. Anyone living in Mexico would know that CDMX is Mexico City, and that it is the capital of Mexico. They would know that AMLO is Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and that he is the President of Mexico. However, our students probably don't know that. As Maris and I write our news summaries, we add in background knowledge that your students need to know in order to understand the news story. Often, this requires a lot of research on our part! We love having a reason to expand our own knowledge base as we work to bring you a high quality product!
Once we have a news story that students can make sense of from a content perspective, we focus on making the language comprehensible to students. We use the strategies outlined in this post to make each piece of new information digestible to students.
For 2019-2020, we are taking our "comprehenisification" a step further: we will be providing a Novice-level summary of each news article. With this addition, we will now be offering THREE versions of each news article:
- NOVICE: a digest/summary version of the news story with parenthetical glossed vocabulary, designed for students in their first semester of studying Spanish
- INTERMEDIATE: a detailed version of the news story with footnoted glossed vocabulary
- INTERMEDIATE+: a detailed version of the news story that includes a few extra details and does not feature glossed vocabulary
Ready to go activities for each news story
Our vision is for teachers to add the published issues to their class library as free reading material. Historically, we have only published news articles: no instructional materials. For the 2018-2019 issue, we began sharing a list of related authentic resources that teachers could use to delve further into the topic with their students.
In the interest of removing barriers that prevent teachers from using these articles in their classes, for the 2019-2020 school year we will provide ready-to-use activities for each article. We acknowledge that while reading simply to read is effective and helps create lifelong readers, there are many reasons for which a teacher might need or want to attach an assignment to a reading. Download the preview issue to see what kinds of activities you can expect to find in the 2019-2020 subscription!
Projectable news stories
We have always provided an editable version of the news stories so that subscribers can pull the text of the article to create activities or projectable readings for their classes. For the 2019-2020 subscription, we want to make it even easier for you discuss individual articles with your entire class! Instead of sharing an editable, text-only word document, we will provide an editable, projectable slide for each article that includes its featured image. If you are not sure what it looks like to read a news story together with your students, click here for a demo!
Articles published bi-weekly
This year (2018-2019), we offered two subscriptions: a weekly or a bi-weekly option. For the 2019-2020 school year, we are ONLY offering a bi-weekly subscription. We are limiting the publication schedule so that we can offer supporting materials with each issue. The subscription guarantees 20 issues.
Issues will be published every other Monday morning from September through June. The exact dates of publication are listed in the product description (click here to see more). In addition, we will publish Breaking News stories as needed; probably no more than a few issues throughout the year. Breaking News Special Edition issues will highlight notable events that happen during off-weeks but that teachers really want to talk about with their students. For example, in the 2018-2019 school year, we published Ojo con México, several Venezuela updates, and this special edition that highlights some fun stories that weren't about Spanish speaking countries.
Each published issue will include the following resources:
- 5 news stories from the Spanish speaking world, written in Spanish and provided in 3 versions (see above)
- Suggested authentic resources for further exploration
- Activities/suggested activities for each news story
- a print-ready, formatted PDF version of each version of the articles
- a projectable, editable version of each article
Department use
You or your school needs to purchase a separate license for each teacher that plans to use these stories in their classes (5 teachers = 1 full price subscription + 4 reduced price licenses). We recommend creating a TpT for Schools account (it's free - click here to learn how!) so that each user can access the bi-weekly updates with ease.
If you do not have a TpT for Schools account, additional licenses can be purchased from “My Purchases” in your TpT account.
Ready to get started?
