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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.

My corporate Spanish links, all in one place

I just tagged on my Delicious all the Spanish-language corporate websites that I've mentioned on my blog.  It makes it a lot more convenient to find the sites that my students have found interesting.  You can find it here:

http://delicious.com/wandermami/Corporate_Spanish_sites

Build your perfect tenis (en español)

Here's another website idea--use nikecorre.com's shoe-builder to build the shoe that's right for you. I mean, for your students.

http://nikerunning.nike.com/nikeos/p/nikeplus/es_LA/footwear_finder

Latin Grammy website gets a cool makeover... and nominations!

The website of the Latin Recording Academy has undergone a serious makeover, and I have to say it is COOL. More importantly, the nominations for the Latin Grammys are out!! This is an important way for me to see what's new and what's popular-I'm always embarrassed at how few names I even recognize on the list! Gives me hours of entertainment on YouTube trying to figure it out though. :-) Check it out!

Bob Esponja on Mundonick

I'm not sure why, but in my students' flurry of Spanish-language corporate sites they used for this project, we didn't run across Nickelodeon's Mundonick.com, probably because I was looking on Nickelodeon's US page and not finding a language change, so I figured they oddly didn't have one. But then recently I googled 'nickelodeon español' and what a cool site! Games! Fun! It surprised me how much my teenagers knew, all the characters' names and such, and instead of thinking it was a goofy kid thing, they really enjoyed the throwback and clamored to be the one to choose where we should go. Enjoy some Bob Esponja or Los Pingüinos de Madagascar.

Raimundo, the bilingual Latin American snail

Ever heard of Sorpresa TV?

It's kid shows, only in Spanish!

Among the many shows is The Wumblers, featuring Raimundo, a bilingual Latino snail. You can watch episodes online. Really, you've gotta check it out. Talk about fodder for early Spanish learners!!

Also check out the site's section of bilingual games.

More interactive websites, courtesy of my students

I'm all about sharing free activities we've found on the internet as opposed to paying a ton of money for not-very-useful curriculum supplements. The internet worksheet project my Spanish 2 students are currently working on has taken them in some really fun directions. They've come up with stuff I don't know I ever would have thought of. I just had to take some time in class this week to play around with them.

New favorites this week:
Hotwheels Mexico -- fun games
Crayola Mexico -- it's better than their US site
Build-a-Bear US/Español -- the games are in English but it's fun to look around at the animals. And the ecards are in Spanish.

Try them out with your class and see what happens. You might think such sites are too kiddie for high schoolers, but I can't reiterate enough how much context children's material gives them, and how their success in understanding and fun with playing with things will motivate them to like it.

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.

A project based on motivation

Here in Kentucky we're still digging out from last week's ice storm. Yesterday I was able to get online for the first time in a week, so today, it's back to blogging!

If you've taught from a textbook for very long, you've found that they're just not motivating to students who aren't already self-motivated, and motivation is absolutely the key to success. Anyone without a brain defect that inhibits language can acquire another language if motivated enough. I'm convinced that our biggest task is finding ways for our students to interact with the language in ways that are 1) meaningful to them and 2) meaningful in light of the world around them, because that's motivating.

A project I came across seems to be especially good for this, because they get to pick the topic of their interaction, in the highly visual and auditory format of the internet (and isn't this generation visual!). I talked about my Spanish 2 students completing last years' best internet worksheets in this post. You can read the entire project description and requirements in this document.

It amazes me the sites they come up with for this--usually something they're really in to that I wouldn't even think of. Some of the best ones I've seen are Coke Costa Rica and McDonald's Mexico. I also had students do Nestle's cooking site and Louis Vuitton handbags. Disney and Nike are always favorites. There are a million choices out there, anything from the Dominican Republic's official baseball league to Warner Bros to Pantene, the White House, the art museum El Prado (careful with that one, some of the art is, well, nude), and Nintendo Wii. The limit is only their imagination!

Internet scavenger hunts

I'm constantly looking for communicative, interesting tasks for my students to either create or complete. My Spanish 2 project for the 3rd quarter is an internet scavenger-hunt-type worksheet. Students choose a Spanish-language website and then create a series of questions for another student to complete. The questions can involve playing a game, listening to music, creating a virtual car, etc. Since I haven't been able to find much in the way of free communicative worksheets on the internet, I definitely wanted to share the best. Here are some of the very best I got last year:



BMW Mexico by Stephanie

Atari by Louise

Disney Latino by Rebecca

Honda Mexico by Clint

Super Smash Bros by Christian



I believe I cleaned up all of them except the Atari one, because I didn't use that one for my Spanish 2 students this year. You may have to tweak that one a bit. The others I did quickly check last week (because my sub is actually using them today) and updated a few of the items since the websites had changed. They had changed surprisingly little, so they should be usable for quite some time with little revision. Feel free!