I am using stories more and more often in my lessons as I believe my students greatly benefit from listening to them as well as reading them and writing new ones. Apart from inventing my own stories, my favorite source is The Comprehensible Classroom which has a wealth of fantastic resources and story scripts.
The verb "gustar" is not an easy verb to use as it is so different from "normal"verbs. The majority of students know how to use it in the first person singular "me gusta" but they rarely know how to use it when they want to refer to someone else.
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,
Here is another story script which follows the last story about Elena trying to apologize to Pedro. This time Elena offers a present to Pedro and he has to open different packages. The focus is on the difference between “¿Por qué?
I simplified the story script I wrote about little Pedro losing his notebook to focus on “¿Dónde está?”, “No lo sé” and "es importante para...". I also changed the ending to make it more surprising and funnier to my students.
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 have just come across Bryan Kandel's website and he has highlighted a few useful web tools to use in the classroom. One of them is Textivate which is Taskmagic web-based little brother. Ten years ago, when I started teaching Taskmagic was the one software we used in the classroom and language teachers just loved it!