Teaching Time with Spanish Interactive Notebooks

This past week we began studying time. We started out with a PowerPoint on time and students took notes in their interactive notebooks.

Then we got started on our time foldables for our interactive notebooks. It gets a bit messy, but they are pretty good about cleaning up without being reminded. I do desk checks before they can be dismissed because there are, of course, those students who just shove scraps of paper into their desks. :)

For this time unit, I created 2 different types of notebook foldables, a set for time vocabulary and then a set of flipable clocks where students drew on the hands and then added the times underneath. They can use all of these as study tools to prepare for the quiz.

 I was also super excited to use a new time task card set, but ran out of time, so that will wait for next week. Tonight though, as I was writing this blog post from my kitchen counter, I looked outside and saw a beautiful sunset...I just had to share! Happy Friday all! Enjoy the weekend! 

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4 Ways to Use Memes in Spanish Class

Memes!!! Do you love them?? I can have a bit of a corny sense of humor, so these are right up my alley. I've been saving some that I have come across to this Pinterest board and I've started thinking of ways that I can incorporate them into my Spanish classes. I'm specifically choosing images that are clever yet simple enough for my beginning Spanish classes to actually "get".  As much as they may roll their eyes about some of these, deep down I know they love 'em. :)

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Teaching Subject Pronouns and Ser with Interactive Notebooks

So this past week we dove more into our interactive notebooks by starting a review unit on Subject Pronouns and Ser. My 9th grade Spanish class has down some basics since they had Spanish once a week in Middle School, so they have a jump start on Spanish 1 already. I started the lesson with Sra Cruz's subject pronoun PowerPoint which I've used for years to introduce the topic. The students took notes on one page of their notebook as we went through the PowerPoint. You can see that they are already working on using color and highlighting in their notes in the photos below. 

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2 Creative Activities for the First Days of Spanish Class

Whew...made it! Week one is over! As always, the first week of school is a bit hectic as the the year gets going. A positive (in most cases) aspect of teaching at a small school is that you pretty much know all of the students before they show up in your classroom. Many of these students are the same students I've had for the past 3 years, so we both know what to expect from each other. :) Here are 2 activities creative activities that we incorporated into our first week of Spanish class!

1. I was excited to have my students make ¿Quién soy yo? banners for the classroom. They enjoyed doing this and they added a nice touch to the bulletin board. Next time, I'll definitely have them write their answers to the prompts in a dark marker. This will definitely show up a lot better and make them easier to read from a distance.

You can grab this activity in my TpT store by clicking the photo below. :)

2. Next, I was really excited to have my students set up their "cuaderno interactivo". Ok, so this took a LONG time. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it did take awhile to explain the process and add the table of contents and grading rubric. We added the table of contents to the front cover and the grading rubric to the back cover. I plan to grade notebooks at the end of each quarter.

For their first notebook page, I had students brainstorm the topic "5 Reasons to Study Spanish". They then went home and created the page for their first homework assignment. I left the instructions open-ended and just told them to make a colorful graphic which included their 5 reasons. I was pretty pleased with what some of my interactive notebook newbie students came up with!

One student even listed her 5 reasons by drawing Grand Cayman and adding one reason to each of the 5 districts on the island. There's a little Cayman Islands geography lesson for your day. :)

Overall, a great first week!

How was your first week of school?

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