Reading activities for current events

Film, politics, sports, conservation, and activism–these are just a few of the topics that the stories from the new EL MUNDO EN TUS MANOS subscription have addressed. Maris and I are passionate about finding stories that your students will connect with and that will open their eyes to the things happening in the world, near…

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Current events & free fiction magazine in Spanish

Once I decided to teach for proficiency, I become hungry for stories–real stories, invented stories, silly stories, sad stories, unbelievable stories, scary stories…anything.  Language is best taught when it is being used to transmit messages, not when it is explicitly taught for conscious learning. ― Stephen D. Krashen, The Natural Approach: Language Acquisition in the Classroom If you…

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News you can use in Spanish classes: new subscriptions!

This spring, we celebrated the two year anniversary of El Mundo en tus manos, the news publication that brings you simplified news stories from the Spanish speaking world! It has been a fantastic two years, and I have enjoyed curating current events from around the globe to bring you interesting and important stories that will…

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Los héroes del terremoto – Materials for Spanish teachers

An 8.2 earthquake shook southern Mexico on September 7, leaving Oaxaca completely devastated. It was the strongest earthquake that Mexico had felt in 100 years. Just 12 days later–when relief efforts were still in their infancy and aftershocks continued to rock the area–a second earthquake of magnitude 7.2 struck central Mexico. The 7.1 quake occurred…

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Free article: El ataque en Las Ramblas, 8/17/17

La paz empieza conmigo. Say it! This article about today’s terrorist attack in Barcelona is written in super simple Spanish–almost entirely cognates–so that you can use it with students that just began their Spanish study. Even still, it will not be ‘highly comprehensible’ to fresh Spanish students because it is lengthy. It is up to you…

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Quiz Quiz Trade ::with Afro-latino example question set::

It’s no secret that I loved my past life as a self-identified ‘cooperative learning’ teacher. Thanks to the Anchorage School District and my methods teacher, I attended my fair share of Kagan strategies as a pre-service teacher and newbie public school teacher. Once I learned about Comprehensible Input from Michele Whaley, Cooperative Learning Martina retired.…

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News Summaries from the Spanish speaking world

News summaries in the target language are such an easy way to provide cultural, comprehensible input to your students. You can write summaries that are as simplified as your students need in order to be comprehensible to them. Inspired by Maris Hawkins, I began publishing weekly news summaries of stories from the Spanish-speaking world last spring, in Spanish, written for…

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