Reading to promote language acquisition

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.

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More on Spanish food

Last night I posted a video about Spanish table manners from Ben and Marina. Here is another video from Ben and Marina to learn and/or review Spanish fruit and vegetables:

As well as the video, you can get the full list of vocabulary on Ben and Marina's website.

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activity13 Ben and Marina2 conversation12 curriculum5 drinking2 eating2 Education8 expressions3 fluent12 food13 fruit5 grade 108 grade 98 IGSCE1 list3 listening29 memorize5 Notes in Spanish2 Spanish27 speaking37 table2 talk4 topic8 vegetable1 video32 vocabulary18 wiki5

Which Spanish books for the school library?

The very kind librarian at my school sent me an email about whether I could send her a list with titles of Spanish books for the library as there is some money to be spent. However, I am not sure what would be the best/most useful for the students to order.

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activity13 books1 Education8 foster1 lesson4 librarian1 library3 listening29 novel4 project10 read7 reading36 series3 Spanish27 stories3 story34 telling3

Mentormob: the perfect tool for independent learning.

José Picardo who is Head of Modern Foreign Languages at Nottingham High School in England is the curator of Box of Tricks which I follow since I started using the Web 2.0, a few years ago. It is always a mine of discoveries for the best tools to use in the classroom.

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box of tricks1 Education8 flip2 independent3 jose picardo1 knowledge4 language26 mentormob1 online7 playlist2 quiz4 share8 Spanish27 teaching8 tool7 video32 web 2.08

Immigration project in Spanish

As Kevin Mclaughlin mentionned in his great post Set learning free in 100 words, we as teachers should "try not to overplan, forget the detail and be confident in changing direction as and where learning takes you." This is exactly what I attempted to do with this project I set up last year with grade 7.

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Africa1 diary1 Education8 Gibraltar1 immigration1 Manu Chao1 present perfect1 project10 reading36 skills24 song10 Spanish27 speaking37 writing17

2013 Goals

It has become a tradition now to start the new year with new goals. Looking back at 2012, it has been a busy year mainly because or thanks to the arrival of number 3, Augustin. He is nearly one year (already!) and I am still on maternity leave until August.

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Wikipedia: should we use it?

Our students use Wikipedia to research. However it is still largely criticized and even banned by some educators. One day when my students were preparing a presentation about a South American country, they asked me if they could use Wikipedia. Some teachers had actually banned them to use it because according to them it was not accurate enough and nobody checked its accuracy.

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