Become a more confident language teacher.
As luck would have it, mice began to seek shelter from the harsh Alaska winter just a few weeks before midterms back in 2012. I saw them everywhere! Running across my kitchen counters, scampering along the walls of my living room, and dashing under the shelves each time that I opened my garage door. My…
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It’s hard to believe that 2015 is almost over! I am scrambling to finish my 2015 goal of going paperless. Spoiler alert: it’s not going to happen. But I am close! This evening, I stumbled across a reading that I used to extend a class discussion in the first few weeks of my Spanish 2 course—click here…
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This script focuses on verbs with irregular stems and endings in the preterite tense. CORE VOCABULARY STORY SUMMARY Two characters go to the same place every day. One day, the main character arrives at the park and doesn’t see the other person. They call them and ask where they are and tell them something special…
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My maternity sub is unavailable on one day during finals week, so I needed to develop a new final exam for Spanish II that did not involve the use of the computer. (Last year, I gave my students this exam based on the video La leyenda del espantapájaros.) Wanting to do as little work as…
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After introducing regular preterite conjugations through the stories La muchacha y la ardilla and La madre de Jasón, it was time to tackle the irregular preterite verbs. First category? I-Y changers (oír, leer, concluir, caer, etc.). My students once again helped me to write a fun script, “Ruidos en la noche” (“Noises in the night),…
Read MoreThe journey continues…and I am continuing to love it as my students continue to have great success learning new structures and producing grammatically correct past narration! Woohoo! We followed up our focused study of -AR regular preterite verbs, using the “La muchacha y la ardilla” story, with a focused study of -ER and -IR regular…
Read MoreSo remember how I mentioned that I have an intern this quarter? Well, she’s awesome. It has been SO GREAT to have someone to talk through ideas with. Two brains are better than one, that’s for sure! We just finished a killer CI-friendly introduction to -AR preterite verbs (since I am backtracking and trying to…
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Unfortunately for me, ‘backward planning’ usually means doing things backward: as in the wrong order. I have never had a systematic way of introducing past tenses to my students, and so their knowledge of it is always somewhat spotty. They leave my Spanish II class able to interpret the past tense with ease, but their…
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I’m always excited to find ways to use Awkward Family Photos in class, and today I thought of a new one! My students have not learned the structure ‘se puso + adjective’ (s/he became ___), and it is a high frequency structure in Chapter 3 of El Nuevo Houdini. Always on the hunt for DIFFERENT…
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I wrote this version of Little Red Riding Hood last year as a preterite practice for my students. It includes comprehension questions and a follow-up grammar activity that focuses on the verb forms. Sherry in PA found the activity on my website http://www.martinabex.com and created an ActivInspire Flipchart to accompany it. Her website also has super…
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