Not your average health unit

foto por USP Hospitales

A unit on health is common in Spanish class. We have a unit in Spanish 2 on describing ailments and visiting the doctor. Then in AP I have a unit called "Cuidándome a mí" (taking care of myself). It's useful -last year's AP essay was health-related- but for AP I wanted to go beyond the typical reflexive verb, sickness phrases, doctor questions vocabulary and activities. Besides, our principal asked us this year to focus on hands-on learning with our students. So how could I make the learning hands-on, relevant, and connected to communities and culture?

Every unit in AP contains four performance assessments: interpersonal speaking, presentational speaking, interpersonal writing, and presentational writing. I've had a focus in this unit for the past two or three years on healthcare and undocumented immigrants, but this year I wanted it to really matter. Here are the assignments we did for each:

1) Interpersonal speaking

One student played a doctor's receptionist, and the student being assessed was someone in the doctor's office. I was a mother whose child needed a chicken pox vaccine in order to go to school, but didn't have any health insurance or much money. So the receptionist won't let me make an appointment, and the student had to explain to me that I could get the vaccine at the health department. To complete this task my students had to a) get the address and phone number of the health department in our city, b) identify language options at the health department, c) find out what kind of care is offered at the health department, d) find out whether undocumented immigrants can get care at the health department, and e) understand how services are paid for at the health department. And these students had never even heard of the health department!

Here's April completing this task.

2) Presentational speaking

Scenario: The local Latino community is having a town hall meeting to talk about local health care options. Several local political leaders are attending (with translators). Based on an article about undocumented children in the health reform debate and a video about a baby's life being saved at Seattle Children's Hospital, present a 2-minute argument about why undocumented immigrant children should or should not receive healthcare services at health departments and hospitals.

3) Interpersonal writing

Students had to locate a doctor in the city who spoke Spanish. This involved actually calling the offices to verify that they had Spanish-speaking staff and to get their address. Then they wrote a letter to the doctor explaining what they had learned about the undocumented and/or uninsured Spanish-speaking community and encouraging the doctor to get involved in free or low-cost clinics in the area. We are mailing these letters.

4) Presentational writing

Students wrote a lengthy letter to our Congressman, John Yarmuth. Based on a Pew Hispanic Center study, comments by the Republican presidential candidates, and a radio program addressing changes in the California MediCal access laws, students addressed such questions as:

-what is the most reasonable response to the healthcare crisis?

-if we treat everyone indiscriminately, will healthcare costs rise to an unsustainable level?

-how can we control costs for those who can't pay without overburdening society?

-what kinds of healthcare are human rights and what aren't?

-what do we do with undocumented children who had no say in their legal status?

-should undocumented immigrants receive healthcare anywhere, or only in certain places?

-how can we inform undocumented immigrants on their healthcare rights and options?

I am going to write an English-language note to accompany these letters, explaining what we did to Mr. Yarmuth and telling him that my students care enough about the Latino community that they have taken the time to learn their language, and if he will take the time to find someone to translate their letters, he will get some interesting opinions, as well as getting a taste of what language negotiation immigrants have to go through to become informed. Then I'll mail them.

I actually posted about this unit two years ago, but I think now it's become a lot more relevant and service-oriented.

Myth #6: Memorizing vocabulary

For my original post about the myths, look here.

foto por Micheo

Myth #6 is this:

Students learn vocabulary in long lists of isolated words (or, we just went over bosque, why can't they remember it and remember it's masculine?).

What a mistake I used to make, and textbooks make. To think that we can give students a list of vocabulary, tell them there's a quiz on Friday, and somehow think they'll be able to use it next month, or next week for that matter.

Here's the truth: students learn words they need to do what they want to do. Think about the words you know - they are words you need to accomplish something. I don't know how to talk in Spanish about nuclear power plants. I barely know how to talk in English about nuclear power plants, and what I do know I know because my father worked at one for thirty years. Our brains are efficient - most of us just don't bother remembering terminology we never need to communicate something.

If you've interacted with me for very long, you know that my students do free-topic blogging. I once had a student who wrote nearly every week about hunting. It was his passion. The verb cazar was not in our vocabulary for Spanish 3. But you can bet that before long he knew that and the words for all the different animals he hunted. Why? Because he wanted to. In Spanish 3 every year, we read the novels Cajas de cartón and Esperanza renace. Both deal with immigrant children. Though the words are not in our vocabulary list, by the end of the year they are completely familiar with words like migra, campesino, pizcar, and frontera. Why? Because they need them to talk about the issues in the books.

It's one of the most freeing things that has ever happened to me in my professional life to come to the realization that students will naturally acquire the vocabulary that interests and helps them without me drilling or quizzing it.

As a few resources for you, check out the archive of last year's #Langchat on rethinking how we teach vocabulary. I also have done several blog posts on this topic, including how I do vocabulary (surprise! I do give out vocab lists!), why you should kick the vocab quiz, and what you might do instead of the vocab quiz. Also check out cybraryman's page on teaching vocabulary, as well as Edutopia's insightful post on the topic.

If you're into research, read up on what it has to tell us about teaching vocabulary, including that shallow processing memorization doesn't work. For a tempering opinion, if it's worth a book purchase to you, you could read Vocabulary Myths by Keith Folse, who warns that throwing out vocab lists and stopping teaching it explicitly is too dramatic and not actually an answer to the vocab question.

However you decide to present and teach and review your vocabulary, my advice is to seek more ways to focus on these five keys:

1) motivation - make it vocabulary students find interesting.

2) useful - students see value in vocabulary when they can see themselves using it.

3) frequency - in every way you can think of, integrate the vocabulary that everyone uses.

4) phrasal - fool with words and phrases to encourage chunking of words commonly used together

5) less is more - concede that students can only acquire so much at a time, and give up on the rest (at least until later).

Jumping on the Animoto bandwagon

I've heard a lot about Animoto but it's always been filed away in that "I'm sure it's great, but I'm on technology overload here" part of my brain. This week I decided to finally jump in and make on.

If you stick with the basic account, it's more than mildly annoying that you can't do anything past 30 seconds without a paid account. But thanks to @ckendall for the heads-up that you can apply for a free educator account. Mine came through immediately (no 2-week wait like they cautiously say). That gives you unlimited videos for you and up to 50 students.

Yesterday, our first day of school, I was in the new position of actually not knowing my Spanish 3 students. This is the first class I've had that I didn't already have in a previous class. So, we talked about why each one of them elected the class. I took some of their ideas, grabbed some photos from Flickr Creative Commons, and made a quick Animoto. Today I did the same thing with some vocab from AP's first unit.

What will you make?

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Combat the 'este tiempo' monster

photo by Xiang Xi

I don't know about you, but my students even in their third and fourth years will slip into phases where they keep saying or writing 'este tiempo' instead of 'esta vez.' Or, un otro tiempo or más tiempos or el último tiempo. Here are a couple of songs to combat that monster.

The first is "Por esta vez" by Belanova, which obviously has it in the title, and so twice in the chorus, and so many repetitions throughout the song.

Another is Irreemplazable by Beyonce with 3 repetitions of 'esta vez.'

Also you have Noviembre sin ti by Reik with 4 repetitions of 'otra vez' and Fotografía por Juanes ft. Nelly Furtado with quite a bit of 'cada vez.'

Enjoy!

For tonight's #langchat: A game for description

Tonight's #Langchat topic is using games to support instruction. I have no idea how to describe a game in 140 characters so I thought I'd post it here.

This is a game good for low levels. It works great to reinforce describing people. It's useful for students to have the verbs 'have' 'wear' and 'is.' The game is called "¿Quién tiene la moneda?" (In Spanish, "who has the coin?")

One student leaves the room and the teacher gives a coin to someone in the room. All students should know who has the coin. The excluded student comes in and can ask anyone a yes or no question. Everyone except the student who actually has the coin must tell the truth. The student who has the coin can lie--this throws a twist of strategy into it.

So the student who is asking should ask questions like
--is it a boy?
--is he wearing blue?
--does he have blue eyes?
--is he blond?
--is he wearing glasses?
You can make things interesting like limiting the number of questions, and then forcing a guess. If the student guesses correctly, he chooses someone to go out next. If not, the student with the coin goes out next.

You can also substitute items for the coin -- pencil and other early vocab, for example.

Have fun!

Instead of the vocab quiz

@SraSpanglish commented on my post "Kick the vocab quiz":
"I feel like I can't do this with Spanish I, and it's hard with Spanish II. Also, what are students graded on instead?"

At this point, I only teach very early elementary, who only receive a grade of "excellent/satisfactory/needs improvement" once a quarter, and advanced students. I realize that's quite an uncommon setup. But when I was teaching 5 periods of Spanish 1 and 2 (along with Spanish 3) I also never gave vocab quizzes. I'm a bigger fan of @alfiekohn than I am of grades, but at my school we have to give them (as, I'm sure, do you) so here's an outline of where my assessment comes from.

In Spanish 3 and 4 (AP), both classes receive grades for:
Completing the chapter guides for our books
Writing a free-topic blog post once a week
Doing listening cloze quizzes on things such as commercials
Doing a regular vocabulary review (see #1)

In Spanish 3, students also:
do intermittent writing/speaking assignments related to recent target features (in class)
do an end-of-unit assessment, profiency- and task-based, as in a how-to demonstration (to elicit commands) or telling an interesting true story about themselves (to elicit combined past tenses)

In AP, students also:
do a weekly "fluency" activity on their own
write AP-style essays & interpersonal writing pieces
do AP-style oral presentations

When I was teaching Spanish 1 & 2, students did:
-the same regular vocabulary review
-also a weekly blog post, beginning with question prompts in 1st semester of Spanish 1 and changing to free-topic word count requirements starting in the 2nd semester of Spanish 1
-also listening cloze quizzes (the difficulty is in the words you drop- for beginners, you drop numbers and greetings, for example)
-also prompted writing/speaking with target features (i.e. 5 phrases describing your family using person + es + adjective from vocabulary)

Different from advanced students, however, were:
Yes, vocab quizzes. Well, I suppose you could call them vocab quizzes because they were assessment designed to elicit vocabulary. But my format of low-level quizzes were always unannounced (to avoid short-term memory cramming) and took three forms:
1) Ask random questions to elicit vocab, and the answer just has to make sense or be true. (¿De qué color son los 'arches' de McDonalds?)
2) Ask questions about stories we've been doing in class. (¿Quién es el amigo del pingüino?) Students were required to draw/label stories in their composition notebooks and were allowed to use them for quizzes.
3) Describe a drawing for students to draw and grade on how the drawing turns out. ("Hay una niña. La niña tiene una banana verde.") Colored pencils were a supply requirement.

Hope this helps clarify how I did some of my lower-level assessment.

Do something drastic - kick the vocab quiz

Ah, the vocab quiz, I remember them well. I used to have all my students do what I had to do in college- put all the new vocab on spiral-bound 3x5 cards, English on front, Spanish on back. I would drill myself and drill myself for that dreaded weekly (or whenever) vocab quiz, the one where you had to match the right words, or fill in the translation.

Why? Because I'm motivated (read: driven) by grades.

I remember the first time I had a B on my midterm report in college. I cried. (Here you go, more insight into me.) Intro to Spanish Literature. I was so annoyed at it that I worked hard enough to get a 100 on the final and bring the grade to a solid A. I never saw the letter B again.

My point is that vocab quizzes are a colossal failure. They are based on several false assumptions:
1) Quizzes produce long-term memory.
2) Short-term memory is desirable in any way in the language class.
3) Motivation by grades will draw the language learners to acquire more words.

When you give a vocab quiz, you're asking students to cram discrete words into their short-term memory for a grade. Think: what could be more useless? What about the students who aren't motivated by grades? I've heard this rant so many times by vocab-quizzing teachers. "So-and-so just won't study the vocab and fails every quiz! Doesn't he care?" No, no he doesn't. Because grades aren't motivating to him and so you have to find something that is.

And short-term memory? Why not reach for ways that actually create long-term memory of vocab--motivating popular music? reading for pleasure? Articles that use recent vocab? Finding them just takes a quick search on Google News. I just came across an article through a Tweet from a Mexican news source that uses a rich variety of vocab from Spanish 3--you can bet we will be looking at it soon.

Need more reasoning? Here is a list of words and phrases my fourth-year students identified yesterday as we previewed their next chapter in Ciudad de las Bestias:

ardiendo de fiebre
vena
veneno
se arrodilló
se despidieron
al amanecer
apenas
cansancio
tejer
fogata
asar
cueva/gruta
la suya
lanzarse
no quedaba más remedio que
zorros
angosto
fósforos
navaja
chillidos
hermosura
mezcla
tamaño
alcanzó
cascadas
ardillas


They haven't had a vocab quiz or test in two years.

Low-level learners can't understand authentic media, what?

Low-level vocabulary, motivating subject matter, absolutely up-to-date...

tell me again why we aren't using authentic materials in the low levels?

Don't teach a health unit without this song

Somewhere in Spanish 1 or 2 there usually comes up a unit that has something to do with health.  I even have a unit in my AP course (with units I wrote myself) called "Cuidándo a mí" with health-related issues.  In your Spanish health-related unit you really ought to include the song "Bilirrubina" por Juan Luis Guerra.



The song includes a lot of present tense and a lot of wonderful health-related vocabulary like fiebre and aspirina with super-useful verbs like quita with object pronouns.

If you want to delve further, there's an interesting discussion on Word Reference about the use of the word bilirrubina. I love the WR forums-that's how I found out that in this collaboration by Juan Luis with Diego Torres, Torres makes a reference to the Bilirrubina song in the end (I'd heard the song but hadn't noticed that!) and when I listened for it, I heard him reference another of Guerra's big hits, Ojalá que llueva café. Amazing what you'll learn on the yellow brick road.

In the spirit of open source: Ciudad de las bestias

Want to guide your advanced students through a culturally-relevant novel by a Hispanic author, written specifically to adolescents? Good! Intensive reading for pleasure is the best way to acquire vocabulary in any language.

I've put an incredible amount of work into writing reading guides and vocabulary lists for all 20 chapters of Ciudad de las bestias by Isabel Allende.

In the story, Alex, a 15-year-old Californian, must spend some time with his eccentric grandmother while his mother receives cancer treatment in Texas. His grandmother is a nonfiction adventure writer, about to leave with a team from "International Geographic" for the Amazon, in search of the (mythical?) Bestia--the 'abominable jungleman.' Alex's presence can't throw a wrench in her plans so he must tag along. Suddenly the California boy finds himself in the middle of the Amazon, picking off leeches, swimming with dolphins, befriending a young Brasilian-Canadian girl with whom he gets kidnapped and must embark on a journey to answer tough questions about who gets to use what in the jungle and what the future holds for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, as well as where his true riches are and where he can find purpose.

Sound like culture? communication? motivating subject matter for teenagers?

My reading guides aren't perfect--just the other day one of my students pointed out I hadn't put page numbers on a few questions-- but here they are, and I encourage you to see the power of reading come alive for your advanced students.

**UPDATE 3 FEB 2011** For new info on these guides, see this post.

I'll try to post some tips on class novel reading soon, but my first one would be to start reading together before assigning it outside of class, so students can get used to the big keys which are:

1-read the question first so you know the big idea you're looking for

2-read so you understand the gist, but not so you understand every word.

Pure present tense & at least 22 repetitions of 'ya no'

This is an old song by Juanes but great for 'ya no'- a phrase used so frequently that doesn't have a good matchup as far as syntax with English. You could say "no longer" but we typically have the 'not' paired with do/does + 'anymore' after the main verb... yuck. 'Ya no' is much more user-friendly. ;-)

The YouTube video actually shows an execution by electric chair so it's a bit rough in that way.

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.

Getting vocabulary from a tweet

You never know what you're going to pick up from following tweets from pop culture icons like @jesseyjoy or @juanes, or from news sources like Venezuela's version of Fox News @globovision or Honduran @diariolaprensa. A great tweet came through today as an example.

One of my favorite groups, the Mexican trio Camila, tweets mainly through two accounts, @pablocamila (the guitarist) and CamilaMX, the official twitter. Mario Domm has an account @dragondomm but he doesn't tweet terribly frequently.

Today this tweet came from @pablocamila:
Quién irá a ganar este partido? Cuál fue la predicción de mi tocayo el pulpo?

In less than 140 characters, you have the vocabulary word 'tocayo' (I don't know when I acquired that word but it's a fun one to have), future for the concept of "I wonder" (extra interesting in the ir + a construction), cuál instead of qué as the question word, and the whole phenomenon of this prognosticating octopus Pulpo Pablo, which is frankly, just flat weird, but hey--by the time you watch videos and read articles about him choosing Spain to win it all (as of this writing the game is tomorrow, so we'll see if he's right), and why not throw in some video of Spain searching for their own Pulpo Paul, not to mention the wealth of hilarious stuff there is to find out there about Argentinian chefs putting octopus paella on the menu ad nauseum, your students will never forget the word for octopus and get some really funny culture mixed in their language acquisition in the process.

Every Spanish teacher should be on Twitter. Start by following me, @secottrell, and looking at my lists of language teachers and music, and follow them. From there it's a yellow brick road.

It's 19 de noviembre!

19 De Noviembre - Carlos Vives

Take advantage of today's date to play Carlos Vives' song 19 de noviembre. Here are some ways to use it:

Listening:
-See if they can hear the date at the beginning without seeing it (Spanish 1).

Culture:
-Tell students to look under "Historia" in this article to see why 19 de noviembre is an important day in Puerto Rico.
-Offer a bonus to someone who can find out why a Colombian singer wrote a song about Puerto Rico. (Interesting that now he and the 2nd wife he wrote the song for are separated.)

Vocabulary:
-patriotic words (evident even for low learners)

Grammar:
-preterite tú forms (almost as good as Qué Hiciste)
-good example of passive se in "se oyen" (hard to find in songs)
-yo/tú future switch
-pronouns, esp. yo reflexives and a rare double-object on double verb phrase in 'te lo quiero agradecer'

Enjoy--it's a good song!

Useless grammar I used to teach

There are a couple of grammar issues I used to teach and I've since decided such explicit instruction on these points is a waste of time. By this, I mean that given the time we have with our students, and what they're really capable of using in fluent speech/writing, explaining the grammatical terms and issues to them isn't going to help their fluency.

One is the personal a. In my experience, you can tell a student all you want that you have to put an a before an object that is a person, but the student will still say veo mi mamá unless they have an overactive monitor, à la Krashen.

The other one is on my radar right now because I'm supposed to be teaching it now, following the sequence in the textbook I loosely use as a guideline, EMC's En sus marcas. It's indirect object pronouns. Or direct ones, for that matter. Again, from my experience, I can tell my students what the difference is (because many of them can't define those in English), which ones are which in Spanish, when they go in front, when they go on the end, when they can go either place, which verbs take one or the other, and they'll still look at something like te veo and read it "you see." There's just too much English background to overcome. So, I opt to include both types of pronouns in all sorts of situations in their vocabulary phrases, so that hopefully their brain will figure out what's going on with all this me/te/etc stuff as they review their vocabulary. Also, when we look at songs, I'm constantly pointing out pronoun/verb sequences and asking what they mean. Yes, I'm asking for an English translation, which isn't what I like, but it's a quick way for me to find out if they know what's going on. And, in increasing numbers, they really do.

If they know that nos ama means he loves us, what do I care if they can define a direct object pronoun? I'll leave that up to their English teacher.

Our students aren't the only ones who have speaking problems!

Want to make your students feel better about their Spanish?

Show them this clip (or part of it, if you need to avoid certain clothing issues b/c of your class makeup). The reality competition "Nuestra Belleza Latina" just kicked off 5 participants because they failed a dictation test. The part where the girl says that she's not worried about the test because her Spanish has improved "bastanto" is my favorite. LOL.

Good target features in here too, from Spanish 1 on up. Nice repetitions of "no puedo" and also a couple different uses of darse por vencida which is something we've just been looking at in Spanish 3.

Activity: News interaction (present perfect)

I just did this with my Spanish 2 students and was surprised at how well it worked.

I went to Google news and typed in a couple of our newsy vocab words from recent weeks--like choque and testigo--and also the helping verb 'han.' I printed out 3 articles (it was 2 pages front and back) and made enough copies to have 1 for every 2 students. In class my students went through and marked with 3 separate colors 1) words that looked familiar but they didn't know them and they weren't in our vocab, 2) words they happen to know from Spanish 1 or experience or cognates, and 3) words that are directly from our vocabulary.

It was cool to watch. As they worked through the article, they negotiated the meaning of it rather well. And these weren't learner Spanish articles. My students said how surprised they were at how much color there was on the page--and how much they knew.

I tried this also with my freshman using a website I just found, a 'learn Spanish' page from the BBC. We've been working with juega and puede lately so I chose an article about soccer in Colombia, two of my favorite topics. I really wanted to use the audio, but the announcer often sounds like a robot. It might work better for you. Anyway, I overheard something from one of my students who always feels behind and like she doesn't understand because she's never had any Spanish before, and typically her grades are lower than the others'. She said to her partner, "Hey, I can speak Spanish!" The joy in her voice was so apparent! I asked her, "What did you say?" and she repeated it for me. It was so empowering for them to find out how much they knew if they didn't look at something and decide it was too hard so they were going to give up. I really had no idea this exercise would turn out this well. I recommend it. :o)

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!

Interactive websites: practicing house/location/color vocab

If you have a way to project a webpage somewhere in your room, you've got to check out es.barbie.com. We did this in Spanish 1 today to practice house vocabulary, but you could use it for so many things. We also did the makeover part of it to practice colors. It's amazing how much they can pick up off a website just from context because they spend so much time online! Also, I have to tell you that my freshman boys were almost more involved in this than the girls. For whatever reason--because it was girls or whatever--they were calling out how her hair should be, what color eye shadow, etc. It was a lot of fun.

Remember, if we frustrate them, they'll give up, and that's the blunt truth of it.

An example of vocab

Here's an example of how I present my vocab. Here are the first three weeks of vocab for Spanish 1 this semester. I never give more than 15 phrases per week, and I don't like giving even that much, but in Spanish 1 especially it's hard to avoid that--they just flat out need the vocabulary. In Spanish 2 their words are often words that are repeated from earlier in the year or from Spanish 1, just in a different tense or as part of a different phrase.

This is the only time I present the words with their English counterparts. My students write them in spiral-bound notecards (that, a composition notebook, and a set of colored pencils comprise their supplies for my class since I don't issue a textbook). They review them for five minutes every day, looking at the English and saying the Spanish in a low but audible voice. I wish I could find a less translation-heavy way of doing that, but it's something the students have asked for (even though they complain about the reviews) and it has seemed to be a good compromise between me not wanting to give them anything in English and them wanting everything in English. During a review, they count how many sets of 10 words they can get through in 5 minutes. After 6 reviews, I collect the review counts to make sure they're getting through a reasonable number of words and are holding steady or improving. And sometimes I have them start in different places just to make sure everyone's seeing all the words at some point.

Anyway, here are the words for Spanish 1:
Week of January 12, 2009:
el año nuevo the new year
ni un poco not even a little
¿de veras? really?
él tiene que poner la mesa he has to set the table
pongo las servilletas allí I put the napkins there (pres.)
el comedor dining room
limpian la cocina they clean the kitchen
lavo los platos I wash the dishes
debes pensarlo you should think about it
pienso viajar pronto I’m thinking about traveling soon
¿Qué piensas? What do you think?
pensamos en We’re thinking about
no cierra la puerta he/she doesn’t close the door
empiezo en seguida I start right away
empezamos tarde we’re starting late



Week of January 20, 2009:
este lugar this place
¿piensas que es bonita? do you think it’s pretty?
el lavaplatos dishwasher
prefiero esa estufa I prefer that stove
esta lámpara this lamp
pásame ese pan pass me that bread
un poco de pimienta a little pepper
preferimos mucha sal we prefer a lot of salt
¿te gusta aquel postre? do you like that dessert (over there?)
lo pone aquí he puts it there
prefieren mantequilla they prefer butter
aquella taza that cup (over there)
necesito una cuchara I need a spoon
este tenedor this fork
pedimos esos vasos we order(ed) those glasses



Week of January 26, 2009:
pregunta si vamos (s)he’s asking if we’re going
preferimos azucar we prefer sugar
tienes que ayudarme you have to help me
escribe una carta (s)he writes a letter
repites you repeat
te digo que… I tell you…
me gustaría saber I’d like to know
dicen que van a ir they say they’re going to go
decimos que sí we say yes
mi cuarto/habitación my (bed)room
pide sopa (s)he orders soup
tengo hambre I’m hungry
tiene sed (s)he’s thirsty
tenemos frío we’re cold