~La Señorita Libertad~

I just saw this post on Pinterest, about the new words that RAE (Real Academia Española = Royal Spanish Academy) has introduced into their dictionary. They're the group of officials who are appointed to oversee the development and usage of the Spanish language. Here's the link to an article: http://www.eltiempo.com/multimedia/fotos/cultyentrete2/las-nuevas-palabras-que-integran-la-edicion-23-del-diccionario-de-la-rae-/14695573 A quick idea that I thought of: Have your native / heritage speakers explore these words and make a PowerPoint/book on interesting words.  Extra credit assignment (I use the RAE info as an extra credit assignment. I'll add it up here soon).  What do you think? How can you use this in your classrooms?

What?! Already?! Yesterday in church, we received the "back to school blessing" for teachers and students. It seems like summer just started, especially because we had a lot of snow days this winter. At any rate, I thought I'd share some ideas that I've been creating for this upcoming school year. What does my grade mean poster? On certain in-class assignments, I assign students a check system. It's something that I started doing, mostly because my cooperating teacher did this when she graded. I don't like to do this for everything, but when I was looking through Pinterest this summer, I saw this: http://www.pinterest.com/pin/282389839110118519/ *please reference the pin above, I'm not sure who created this, so if you know, please let me know!* It made me realize, this is basically what I've been doing. So I've created this . It reminds of a proficiency based scale at the bare minimum. I don't use as many numbers, as I use symbols...

¡Ay, vocabulario! As I'm going into next year, I have a dilemma. How do I teach vocabulary? We use ¡Exprésate! 1 in our district. We break it up into 2 years, chapters 1-4 in Intro. to Spanish and chapters 5-8 in Advanced Spanish.  I want their vocabulary to be authentic, but I need to make sure that my Advanced 8th grade students are ready for their high school placement exam (Scantron & writing) that determines if they will start high school in Spanish 2 as well. At this time, I give students a vocabulary list, and we review it together. I'd like to have a better way to present their vocabulary.  I do like how I start out my clothing unit. I begin by having them do this activity I got from TPT. I love it! Students enjoy it! It's always fun for them to see how much clothing items cost, and we can review the currency exchange between U.S. Dollars and Euros. Plus, I incorporate pictures of my own of El Corte Inglés that I took while studying abroad in Spain. On...