One of the major goals of the FLES program is creating global citizens and building cultural competence. Today, I introduced students to the beautiful country of Spain. The best part of my day was listening to a student ask her mom if they could go to Spain as soon as her mom picked her up! That is telling me that I'm doing my job. I brought some souvenirs back with me including many post cards, flamenco dance essentials, maps, the shell from Santiago, some money and much more! We have so many fun things to learn! We ended the class with this video about Barcelona. We noticed there were many people walking in the streets, but few cars. We even got to look at the Metro map to figure out how we would get around. Here is the video we watched:
We have also been introducing the question: Can I go to the _____? In Spanish we say ¿Puedo ir a ____? We have been practicing with this fun video from Señor Wooly! As promised, here it is:
If you would like to help your student practice Spanish...please visit the Cedar Rapids FLES YouTube channel. You can search for us or just click here! You can then search for videos according to different topics we are studying! You can never practice too much!!!
I love the start of the school year. Students are excited to meet their new teacher, the school is glowing with fresh paint and wax, and teachers are ready to see how much students are going to achieve in the year to come. Even in the chaos of learning a new schedule, I am loving my classes this year. I spent a few weeks this summer on a team developing the curriculum for 3rd and 4th grade, and it is going to be an AWESOME year!
The thing I am most excited about this year is Spain. I lived in Spain for 6 months during my Sophomore year of college and cannot wait to share those experiences!
Here is just a taste!
Barcelona-On top of Casa Mila looking at La Sagrada Famila
Wow! I cannot believe that the year is coming to an end. As my first year is almost complete, I look back and see how much I have grown this year. To my current students, Thank you. I can only imagine all of the mistakes that I have made this year, and you have been so gracious and forgiving. I appreciate your feedback and learning from all of you! Believe it or not, you have probably taught me more this year than I have taught you!
As I'm assessing this week and next I am so happy to see the improvement this trimester. Between the whirlwind of Trimester 1 and the cold and snow days of Trimester 2, we have finally gotten into a rhythm in Trimester 3 and I can only smile as I see how much growth each of my students has made. I'm excited to have almost all of you again next year! Keep up the good work, and stop back next week to see some of the fun activities I have planned for the last week of Spanish class this year! It should be fun :)
Kindergarten was greeted with a class visitor this week! We read the book Go Away Green Monster, and the students were so excited to see that Green Monster came to visit! We practiced the parts of the face, made our own class monster, and then put him back together again to be ready to visit the next group of students! Here are some of the crazy monsters that the Kindergarten classes made!
¿Qué te duele??? What hurts??? We have been practicing body parts! Today we did a partner activity similar to an activity explained in a previous post. However, we are working on body parts this time. Check out this video to see how this activity works. One partner asks what hurts and the other one has to guess what hurts! While the sentence is not perfect Spanish, they are doing a great job starting to put phrases together!
Como vamos a la escuela? We have been learning about different forms of transportation in 2nd and 3rd grade. Today we graphed (hicimos ungráfico) how each of us gets to school. Here is some of the vocab you need to know!
This week we started a new activity in the 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms, a guessing game. I loved walking around the room as students worked well in partners. Not only were they working together, they were speaking 100% in the target language! Wow! Here is what the activity looked like.
*Students were given a partner. They each had an identical card that contained each of the 6 weather terms that we know. They then put a divider/folder up between them so they could not see each others cards. One of them had a cube and placed it on one of their weather terms at random, then asked their partner "Que tiempo hace hoy?" (What is the weather like today?). Their partner had to guess where they placed their cube...all in Spanish! What a fun guessing game!
Senorita Schwartz modeling what to say...
Students at Kenwood playing the game.
Here are some other students doing an awesome job!
