This weekend I am going to present at the Association of German International Schools (AGIS) in Hannover about web 2.0 tools and how I use them to help my students develop their language skills. A lot of my presentation is inspired by the wonderful Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano who emphasizes in her blog that it's not about the tools,
With my current grade 8, we culminated our unit about television with a creative project: to create a new TV program and present it to possible producers!
Before working on the project, we looked at different kind of TV programs in Spain and in South America which lead to different activities and which also provided with a lot of comprehensible input.
As far as homework is concerned, I have been trying something new which has been successful so far. Basically I let my students do what they want as long as it is in Spanish!
At the start of the year I told them that they will acquire the Spanish language,
This school year I started to tell more stories TPRS style. I got no training at all so I do my own thing which seems to work well. I invent stories which are fun to listen to and easy to understand even for Spanish beginners. I already wrote some of the stories when I was on maternity leave and I used them with grade 6 and 7.
I am officially back to work after a wonderful holiday with my family in France and in Spain. It has actually been more than a week that I am back to school but it has been a shock to the system (getting back to the routine after more than a year of maternity leave!).
A few weeks ago, I was asking you for suggestions to order Spanish books for my school library. Over my teaching career, I have found that reading is a key skill, if not the main skill to learn a language. By reading texts and books, language "acquisition" happens.
A picture can be a great start for a conversation when it is hard to get students talking in the target language. In my present school, we prepare grade 9 and 10 for the IGCSE exams and one part of the exam is about students having to converse with the teachers about different topics they have previously learned.