jueves, 18 de septiembre de 2008

¡Progreso!

PRIMARY
Last Tuesday, 9/16, we briefly reviewed typical greetings such as Buenos Días and how to respond when I say ¡Hola clase! ¿Cómo estáis? We practiced "Waking Up Song" again which everyone seems to really like. To see how well they are getting the words and not just the tune, I asked two students to come up and sing while the rest of the class carried out the actions. Considering that it had been two weeks and only the second time since we last practiced this song, they did very well. In the last few minutes, we reviewed some colores using the flag of the Spanish-speaking country of each class.

LOWER ELEMENTARY
My emphasis for estudiantes in Lower Elementary is vocabulary building. Because of their younger age, I've found that they learn more effectively when the exercises involve games, writing, and coloring. On Tuesday, we did two worksheets that reviewed colors and shapes. If you would like to help them, the color that is by far the hardest to pronounce is anaranjado [orange]. Written out phonetically in English would like something like "ah-nahr-ahn-hado."

Today, I finally distributed that long-awaited Tarjetas de identifacación. It has been a lot of fun to see how much something like this means to your children. Afterwards, we worked on identifying common classroom objects such as reloj, silla, ventana, and sacapuntas [clock, chair, window, and pencial sharpener]. I was somewhat surprised to find that they easily memorized one word that I would have considered more difficult- pupitre [desk]. Then I realized that everytime I said it, they all burst out laughing because it's pronounced "pooh-pee-tray." You have to love potty humor, especially when it crosses the language divide.

You will see below that your children now also have apellidos [last names]. These are authentic last names, most coming from people I've met in the past, that I wanted to add to make their tarjetas more official-looking.










































UPPER ELEMENTARY
As usual, we started class on Tuesday, 9/16, with a spelling quiz. The words for this class were apellido, bastante, ingeniero, importante, and familia. The rest of the class time was spent reviewing the conjugation of regular -AR verbs. We have two estudiantes this year that were not with us last year so as part of the review, the students split up in pairs to help each other. Most of my early memories of studying Spanish are how hard it was but these kids just seem to get it. While I do not know when most schools decide to teach conjugation to students, I don't think it was introduced to me until the 6th- or 7th-grade.

Today, our quiz included the words Mercedes, viven, se llama, profesora, and tiene. We then took turns reading sentences from Section 3, La familia de Enrique, of their textbook. I then read the section again and asked everyone a different question based on the text. I am not sure if I should be surprised or not but these estudiantes are getting it and as a teacher, it is exciting to watch it happen! Hasta luego!

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