Story listening is powerful!

https://goo.gl/photos/q3JwpJ4wErVuXC6e9

To me, developing listening skills are vital in life, yet not practiced enough. As teachers, we are told to let students learn by doing (which is valuable too in some cases) and that classrooms should be students led. As a consequence the skill of listening is being put aside,

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Cultural input: the prisons in Bolivia (or how to engage Spanish learners)

How to get students engaged and producing a lot of language???? Well.... I recommend purchasing Martina Bex 7-day lesson plans about Los niños prisioneros de Bolivia as it is truly worth the investment! Not only did it save me a lot of prep-time, it also made my students had a meaningful discussion in the target language!

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The Spanish alphabet

This is a simple activity to do with Spanish beginners when you are teaching the alphabet: students create their own alphabet page by looking for words which start with each letter of the Spanish alphabet. This is the first year in my teaching career that I do this activity and I have found out that my grade 6 students (11-12 years old) had a lot of fun doing this.

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Speaking activity: giving opinions about TV programs and films.

This is a fantastic idea from one of my emails from the mflresources@yahoogroups.com: "I show the students some clips (2-3 mins each) from YouTube and they play the role of critic - after each clip they get 30 seconds to write their opinion of each clip and then a further 30 seconds to share their opinion with their neighbor.

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Reading activity: una televisión para los perros

I believe reading in the target language is crucial because it promotes fluent reading skills which then leads to fluency in the other language skills such as speaking and writing. Fluent reading means reading without a dictionary, which can be challenging if students read an authentic text or a book.

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Back to school with a song: mi persona favorita

I am back to school after a wonderful summer vacation and in order to get back into the swing of things, I found this catchy song which I played to my grade 8 and 10 classes:

As I mentioned in an earlier post,

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Pablo Picasso y el Guernica for Spanish beginners

As the school year draws to a close, I have chosen to read a book in Spanish with my students. If we don't manage to finish the book, my students will have to finish reading it over the summer holidays which will be an excellent practice to keep up their Spanish.

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