So, what are the cuentos?

I took the scariest leap a teacher can take.

I now teach without a textbook. Well, mostly.

I use EMC Publishing's series En sus marcas (Spanish 1), Listos (2), Ya! (3), which is what my school gave me, as a rough sequencing tool. So, I use it to more or less order what concepts I cover when, and as a reference for the students for charts of things, and very occasionally for an exercise I find useful.

Other than that, I tell stories, we write, we talk, we watch, we listen, we sing.

A brief overview of the stories:

In Spanish 1, the first day, students draw a boy with me. We do it almost completely in Spanish. I ask them what color, etc., everything should be. They mostly comprehend the questions and answer in English, but they label things and color the drawing (colored pencils are a requirement for all my classes). The second day, same thing with a girl. The students name the girl. One class named her Mari.

Soon Mari meets a penguin named Jeffrey. Then Mari introduces Jeffrey to her friend Garfield and she goes away. The rest of Spanish 1, most the stories involve interactions between Jeffrey and Garfield.

At the beginning of Spanish 2, we find that Garfield has acquired a computer and is chatting online with a monkey. Garfield decides to go to the circus where he meets the monkey. After he leaves the circus, we meet the clown that the monkey belongs to. Most of the stories for the rest of the year involve the monkey and/or the clown.

At the beginning of Spanish 3, the director of the circus gives the clown a horse. The horse can talk, in Spanish of course, so his name is Señor Eduardo, Sr. Ed for short. Soon the clown falls on hard times and has to sell the horse to a cowboy, and the rest of Spanish 3 involves the horse and the cowboy.

Fin. So far. I didn't storytell in AP (except for using Isabel Allende's Zorro) last year, and I don't teach AP this year (no Spanish 3 last year to feed into it) so we'll see where that goes.