An App for All Grades

¡Gracias por su visita! I am requesting that all 6th, 7th, and 8th graders have the following app/website downloaded (or bookmarked) on their electronic devices: 

www.duolingo.com

DuoLingo is a free language-learning website. Duolingo offers extensive written lessons and dictation, with less practice speaking. It has a gamified skill tree which users can progress through, and avocabulary section where learned words can be practiced.

Users gain “skill points” as they learn a language, such as when they complete a lesson. Skills are considered “learned” when users complete all the lessons associated with the skill. Up to 14 points are awarded per lesson, with one deducted for each mistake. Users start with four “lives” on early lessons, and three on later lessons, a “life” being lost with each mistake. A user must retry the lesson if they make a mistake after all lives have been lost. Duolingo also includes a timed practice feature, where users are given 30 seconds and twenty questions and awarded a skill point and seven or ten additional seconds for each correct answer.The whole course teaches more than 2,000 words.

Duolingo uses a heavily data-driven approach to education. At each step along the way, the system measures which questions the users struggle with, and what sorts of mistakes they make. It then aggregates that data and learns from the patterns it sees.

8th graders have continued work on their Comic Strip Projects this week and have been learning how to access Spanish apps on their new Apple devices.

7th graders have done work with "El árbol genealógico" (Family Tree) and have been learning about possessive adjectives in Spanish. They were also introduced to some Spanish contractions and how to indicate ownership in  Spanish.

6th graders have continued working with the Spanish calendar (how the order of the days of the week differs) as well as weather, seasons, and talking about the past, present, and future using these words (Ayer era... (Yesterday was...); Hoy es... (Today is...); Mañana será... (Tomorrow will be...)

Getting started

¡Hola y bienvenidos! This what we have been working on this week.

8th graders have begun working on their "Conversation Comic Strips." They have created rough drafts and begun working on their final draft paper. This will take them into next week. This unit will end with a gallery walk in which students will reflect and observe on their own work and the work of others.

7th grade Spanish students have been working on their "La Familia" unit. This week we talked about family during warm-up, and we discussed how the hispanic household is similar and different to families across the globe. We learned some new vocabulary and did a short reading in Spanish about "Los Rodriguez," a Mexican family.

6th graders have been bookmarking Spanish websites to practice and review vocabulary they learned in elementary school as well as doing their first speaking activities (warm-up and introductions). We have discussed Latin and romance languages and learned about how words are similar in romance languages. Students reviewed cognates, the importance of accent marks, and basic expressions like stating their birthday, the date, and the weather outside.

Have a great weekend!

First Week of Spanish

8th grade AND 7th grade Spanish students have been using this first week to refresh and review everything have learned in Spanish in 6th and 7th grade. 8th graders have also engaged in a class activity called "Meet My Friend" where they introduced a friend from their new class in Spanish. They found basic information about this friend, their birthday (el cumpleaños), their favorite sport (el deporte favorito), favorite food (la comida favorita), their favorite class (la clase favorita), where they live (¿dónde vives?), etc. Students shared their findings about their new classmates with the group. This has been a good way to jog their memories from last year, and learn about their new housemates.

6th Grade Spanish students learned the routines and procedures of Spanish class this week. They learned how to conduct themselves during our "Daily Warm Up" which is all oral conversation in Spanish. The received their Spanish folders, and learned what can be expected of me and what I expect from 6th graders. We were able to begin talking about the importance of learning a language and world cultures and we began talking about Cognates (words in Spanish that look/sound like words in English and mean the same thing), and False Cognates (words in Spanish that look/sound like words in English but DO NOT mean the same thing). We also reviewed some "días de la semana" (Days of the Week), and "los meses del año" (Months of the Year), "las estaciones" (Seasons) and "el tiempo" (Weather). I am excited to see everything they have learned/remember from elementary Spanish!

¡Bienvenidos! Welcome back!

¡Buenos días! I hope all students and parents had a restful and relaxing summer. I am excited to be starting this fresh new year with some fantastic veteran 7th and 8th graders, and I am thrilled to be meeting my incoming 6th graders.

The first week of school we will be reviewing content from last year and we will use that prior knowledge as a springboard for a productive 2013-2014 Spanish year. Below I am providing some Spanish websites that students utilized last year and are also ones that my new 6th graders will find very accessible. I am going to strongly encourage students to take 10-15 minutes for the next week or so, to review colors, days of the week, months of the year, seasons, weather, body parts, family, numbers, animals, and courteous expressions. I am hoping that the games will jog some memories so all students will start this year in the right mindset and in a good place.

These Spanish game-websites can be found at the following links:

www.spanishspanish.com

www.quia.com/shared/spanish

www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish

www.learnspanishtoday.com/learning_module