Interactive comic creator using Maya & Miguel

The Pbs Kids website's Maya & Miguel section not only has a nice selection of Spanish fun, but one of the features is an interactive comic creator, in which you select the background and then choose which words you want to use and which pictures match the words.  Wait-- it's in Spanish, you choose the words, and then you choose the pictures that match the words? Does that sound like some seriously fun vocab acquisition and practice or what?  I don't care if your students are nine years old or in ninth grade, you've got to try this out.

Ads of the World | Creative Advertising Archive & Community

I'm always on the lookout for authentic print and audio sources. I'm convinced that we should be feeding our students authentic audio and print from the very beginning. I think there's something they can understand in just about anything. (My 1st graders today were "reading" the cuentos on Playhouse Disney Latino's website.) I think if we continually feed them learner language that's all they'll ever understand.

For simple, attention-grabbing language, you can't get any better than advertisements. Check out Ads of the World for a great resource of advertisements in target language from all over the world. (Careful, be sure to screen them first.)

Added some great new links

I've tweaked some of my links on the right - added a couple of "communicative bloggers" and some "communicative tools" including a FANTASTIC YouTube channel for anyone who's raising bilingual kids or teaches Spanish to children. I also finally replaced the old Yahoo radio link with a new link to my Pandora station, so you can listen to the station I use to find almost all the pop music I use in my classroom.

There's so much great stuff out there. :)

First 14 days of Spanish 1

A couple of posts down Jen asked if I had lessons to go along with the Spanish 1 scope and sequence and vocabulary list.

I do! A few, anyway, and at least you can see how I organize and move through Musicuentos. Here are the first 14 days of Spanish 1, in fairly good detail.

Enjoy.

My supply list

I just made my supply list for this year. It's been whittled down a lot this year. The actual one has a clip-art face on it but I don't think that uploaded well to Google Docs.

:)

(Disclaimer: I should add that I teach advanced electives at a private school that doesn't have the faculty or facilities to accept students with special needs, so no offense is intended. Also, I personally know every student on my class rosters so I know they won't be offended.)

Scope & sequence, word list for Spanish 1

About three years ago I finally obeyed the inner voice that was yelling at me that textbooks were terribly unmotivating and out-of-date as soon as they were printed and we closed our textbooks forever and haven't looked back, in Spanish 1 through 3 anyway (we do use a workbook some in AP to get students used to the format of the AP exam).

(Side note: for a good blog post on throwing out your textbooks by Shelly Blake-Plock a.k.a. @teachpaperless, look here.)

As Shelly mentions, one thing textbooks do for us as teachers is give us structure. We do have to have structure, after all. At my school we just hired a new Spanish 1 & 2 teacher (and by new I mean it's her first year teaching as well) and for the past several weeks I've been working on organizing and updating the Spanish 1 and 2 scope & sequence and word lists for her. One thing I've been doing is using Mark Davies' amazing Corpus del Español to edit verb forms for higher frequency (look here for a good explanation by Michel Baker on how to use the Corpus), as well as checking to be sure we have the most frequent words in the lists.

And as I'm a firm believer in sharing the work we do, here are the documents for Spanish 1.
Word list (sorry all the dates are from 2008)
Scope and sequence ("extended" in the spring is because our spring quarters are technically 10 weeks long)
Feel free to "steal" and use whatever you can. As you read, keep in mind I teach in a private Christian school in a textbookless, translation-less, technology-based, storytelling classroom full of pop music and communicative, performance-based assessments.

Spanish 2 coming soon.