Banderas y Más

PRIMARY
Everyone colored the flag of their newly-assigned citizenship today but unlike the elementary students, primary students' nationality was done by class rather than individually. So Ms. Moseley's class is now full of Chileans while Ms. Rayle and Ms. Lewellyn teach Mexican and Argentinian students, respectively. Although coloring may not seem like an earth-shattering concept, it reinforces words (or introduces them, depending on whether or not they have had Spanish before) like rojo, azul, blanco, amarillo, and verde, which we talked about briefly and will expand upon in later classes. It also gave me the chance to photograph everyone individually because, yes, they will be receiving Tarjetas de Identificación just like the Elementary students. Because of their young age and time constraints, though, the process of creating them will be somewhat simplified.

LOWER ELEMENTARY
It is so hard not to smile when I see these kids! They really love to learn and that makes my job a lot easier. Today I spoke to them more in Spanish than I normally do to see if I could keep their attention and assess how well they can solve the puzzle of understanding words that are unfamiliar to them. I asked each of them to take a sheet of paper and write down 3 incomplete sentences, as follows:

1. Soy ________. [I am ________.]
2. Tengo ___ años. [I have ____ years.]
3. Me gusta __________. [I like _____________.]

They then proceeded to slowly fills in the blanks as I would walk around the room and say Soy profesor Day, ¿quién eres tú? or Tengo diez años, ¿cúantos años tienes tú? It was not easy for them but they did figure it out. Once a few of them solved the riddle, so to speak, the rest of the students were able to figure it out pretty quickly. When students learn from each other in this way, it helps solidify what I am saying and it's pretty great to see it all in motion.

By the way, in case you have not learned this before, expressing age in Spanish is done by saying how many years you have not how many you are (i.e. "I have 24 years" not "I am 24 years old"). For the me gusta sentence, I asked the students to write what they like in English since they have not yet learned this type of vocabulary in Spanish. In the next class, though, we will go over what they wrote down and I will be teaching them how to use Spanish to express what they have written.

UPPER ELEMENTARY
We took turns reading sentences from Section 2, Los estudios, of their textbook. While it is difficult to suddenly just start reading in Spanish when you have very little practice doing so, I believe it is a very effective way to quickly learn pronunciation and vocabulary. Right now, most of the class is in what I would call a struggling mode but they are trying hard and that's what counts. I'm confident that by the end of the year, they will be able to see a word they've never heard before and know how to say it with at least 80% accuracy.

After everyone had a chance to read, I read through the same section while they followed along and started asking simple either/or questions, like ¿Estudian mucho o estudian poco? [Do they study a lot or do they study a little?] This was a good way to give them confidence in Spanish because with a 50/50 chance of getting the right answer, most of them answered correctly even though they had never been instructed at how to do so. This is how someone really learns another language- when it is like solving a puzzle- rather than simply being told what something means.

Today's quiz words were: ciudad, hay, compañeros, interés, and como.