19 February 2009

A product I love


EMC Paradigm has a product out called SymTalk. The part I use is a set of 256 symbol cards that are magnetic. (I requested a magnetic board specifically to use this and my school got me both, thank you Whitefield!) The cards illustrate various concepts and words without translation. On mine, the word is there in Spanish, but it's very small at the top--you can't see it unless you're right next to it.

The cards come with a training DVD but the way EMC designed this to be taught, as a curriculum, is pretty forced in my opinion. I think for students it would get old very fast. However, as a support product it works great. For example, this morning I put up the illustrations of phrases with tiene, and also the illustrations of the phrases with está that my students learned much earlier this year. We went over what all of them meant, from tiene sed to está triste, and then my students had to look in a children's book (they each had one) to find an illustration of someone or something that showed that feeling/condition. It was a good review of está, and reinforcement of pairing tiene with concepts we use be for in English, and there was no textbook and no English involved.

Trust me--this one's worth a curriculum request!

3 comments:

Diane said...

I used this a few years ago with 6th & 7th graders and I was really impressed with the complexity & accuracy of my kids' grammar while using it. It's actually quite simple when presented in a concrete way as in SymTalk. I also used it just to supplement. I've seen classes where it's the ONLY vehicle for instruction, but ugh. Kids need variety. SymTalk IS cool, though :-)

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