Welcome Methods Matters Teachers!

It is always so nice to have an opportunity to meet other teachers, share ideas, and connect. We often have few colleagues of our specialty within our school, or even our district- it can get lonely!
Here are a couple of neat sites that I love to print off of. Though the activities are in English, they can easily be modified for the FL classroom. The focus is on elementary teaching, but some of the activities, particularly the games, can be played at any level.
http://www.activityvillage.co.uk/index.htm
There is so much on this site!! Lots of games, printables, etc you modify for your class.
http://kidscrafts.suite101.com
This site is not easy to search, but has lots of good printables once you find them. They have lots of printable card games, like Rummy and Uno, with animal themes, which are really cute.
http://wondertime.go.com/create-and-play/article/at-the-farm-printables.html
These activities are particularly appealing for the little ones. This link will take you to the farm printable page, but you can continue to search the site for other printables. The illustrations are just adorable!!

Enjoy!

Summer doesn't see me sit still!

Although school is out, and I am undoubtedly taking time to relax and enjoy the beautiful weather, thoughts of my classroom are never far away. I am constantly looking for manipulatives- I use them in boatloads of activities, from counting to sorting and classifying, games, etc. A great place to find them (yes, you guessed it!)- garage sales. I recently hit upon a treasure trove of plastic foods which I am sure will come in very handy. Last year I collected small stuffed animals, including an extremely cute anteater, which my students get to hold during class. Naturally, the animals talk and answer questions!
Baby clothes are good for teaching clothes vocab, plastic tea sets and dishes work well for teaching meals and place settings, and you can almost always find game pieces which you can repurpose to all kinds of activities. At any rate, get out there! Not only are they cheap but you are helping to reduce and reuse- always a good thing.

End of the year

We are finally coming to the end of our year- after using eight (yes, I did say eight) snow days this year, it really does feel like we've been in school forever! I always wrap up the year with memory books for each grade level I teach. Inside are songs, poems, and activities related to themes we have learned throughout the year. I love the opportunity to give something to my students that they can take home and share with their parents- and it gives us a moment to take a trip down "memory lane".


For the students who are passing on, I like to add a personal note to the back of each memory book. It is a very emotional time for me!

Kids do say some pretty funny things!

The other day one of my kindergarten students raised his hand and said in all seriousness, "Senora, my brother told me how to say 'boy and girl' in Spanish. It's 'dude and dudette'."
I could hardly keep from laughing!!!!

Olas y holas

At the beginning of each class, we do a greeting activity- this not only establishes a routine the kids can expect, but provides an opportunity for them to practice simple interpersonal vocabulary and skills. Here is a simple one which plays on the homonyms, ola and hola.

The entire group recites the following:
Olas que vienen,
Olas que van,
Hola __________,
¿cómo te va?

The name of a student is put in the blank- you can choose which child will be next in a wide variety of ways:
-the child currently being greeted rolls a ball to another child, who will get the next turn
-using popsicle sticks with all of the students' names on them, the teacher randomly chooses a popsicle stick and calls out the name
-children are greeted in the order in which they are sitting- this works best when they are sitting in a circle

The child who is being greeted then answers the question- ¡Bien! works perfectly even for the littlest of students.

Next student is selected and the greeting is repeated and so on until all students have been greeted.

*It is really cute to have the students make wave motions as the poem is recited.

Un momento chistoso

One of my second graders said today, "I don't get how we understand you, but we do!"
Too cute!

Memorama

I just loved playing memory when I was a kid. Playing it in the foreign language class has loads of possibilities- from the simple -matching two of the same pictures- to the more challenging- matching a picture with a word, or matching two parts of a sentence. As children have more experience with the language, you could have them match pronouns with appropriate verb conjugations (yo + hablo) or matching gender (la + flor).

When I play with my kiddos, I give it a twist. Using a pocket chart, I have taped the numbers 1-20 on the chart, spacing them so the cards can go between the numbers. The playing cards (I make them using clip art from google image search or flashcards) go into the strips of the pocket chart. To play, one kid has to say a number out loud (in Spanish, of course) in order to have me turn the card over. A second kiddo says a second number, upon which I turn that card over. If they are a match, yippee! (or yupiiiii, as the case may be) If not, I flip them over and two new kids get a turn and so on. At the end of the game (usually I allot a specific amount of time to play), we count the number of pairs and say each pair outloud. This way of playing is a great way to get two for the price of one- practicing numbers while at the same time practicing target vocabulary on the memory cards themselves. ¡Disfrutelo!