This week we are completing our final edits to the essay "How is learning a foreign language like discovering buried treasure."  We are finishing the skits on the cow and the monkey.  In addition, we will look at the holiday, Day of the Dead.  There will be an assessment this week, so don't be surprised.

I'd like to apologize to everybody for not having my grades more up-to-date at the moment.  The last three weeks have been very fast with little class time or time for me to sit and grade.  I am updating the gradebook as quickly as I have work graded. 

Thank you for your patience!

I was out sick on Tuesday and the assignment was to write a polished essay.  This is NOT homework.  Please stop working on it if you have not yet completed it.  There will be class time devoted to doing this.  I am so sorry for the confusion and I hope that everybody is doing well!

Well, here it is!  A 5 day school week!!  It was great to see so many of you for conferences, and team building was wonderful!  Thank you everybody for so much support and fun.  I don't know about amybody else, but I'm ready to get back into a routine. 

This week we will continue to work on the vocabulary from the Cow and the Monkey story.  Several students have expressed to me that they are uncomfortable with the pace at which we learned it.  Also, if your child has been doing poorly on quizzes, do not be surprised if you do not see a current quiz this week or in the future.  I am working on a way for students to retake previous quizzes until they have mastered that material.  If you are looking at their grades on powerschool you will see blue dashed lines for the current assignment, and a blue score for the previous assignment.  Anything that is blue is clickable - grades that are ...

The next two weeks are short academic weeks.  This week we only have classes on Monday and Tuesday, and next week we only have classes on Tuesday.  Students will be happy to hear that they have a break from quizzes (although the mean score on last week's quiz was a B) for a short time.  We will be learning another story with all of its accompanying vocabulary.

Friday is midterm.  Can you believe it has gone by so quickly?

This week we will be playing pictionary and vocabulary BINGO.  Students will begin instructing their peers by "reading" symbols out loud to their peers.  We will begin learning vocabulary for our next story.

Last week students learned a story about a boy named Pablo and a hungry monkey.  Then, they created their own ending to the story.  Each day one or two groups are presenting the story to the class.  They should be done by the end of this week.

Each group comes to the front of the room, sets the stage, selects actors and then narrates their story while the actors follow along.  It has been hilarious to see some of the solutions the students have come up with, and exhilarating to watch students understand what they are being asked to do.

We have begun taking notes, although they do not look like what the students were expecting.  The vocabulary notes define the words with symbols and drawings rather than English words.  There are a lot of reasons for this.  One of the biggest reasons is that many words have approximate translations, but not exact translations.  Another very large reason for t ...

We've been having a lot of fun so far this year.  We have learned over 100 words in Spanish by using and reusing them in various contexts.  We have played relay races and hangman, taken two quizzes, and earned a lot of participation points.  As of last Friday students started taking on the role of teacher, asking their peers to follow prompts they had written incorporating the vocabulary we have learned so far.  I have seen a lot of students taking risks, getting creative, and really stepping out of their comfort zone.  I am so proud of everybody.

This week we will be getting vocabulary lists for the words we have learned so far (there still won't be any English) as well as learning a new series of words.