Listening Comprehension / ¿Te gusta ir a la moda?

"La Ropa" is linked to Identities and Personal Attributes in our Ab Initio classes.

In this video (level A1) you can work on descriptions of clothes, places and specific vocabulary at the same time you are exposing your students to native accents. In this case Castilian Spanish. 

The video is located in Spain as well so you can take this opportunity to introduce also your students to some culture, traditions, etc. 
According to the new guide (first exams 2020) this audio passage can be classified as:

Text C / Up to 3 min

Author: Loescher Editore

Audio: 3:15 s

It comes with a pdf to work the audio as well (find it on the right side of the screen)

More listening resources:

• Spanish Project
• Loescher TV
• The American Association of Teachers of Spanish
• Spanish Listening
• Spanish Resources

Lunaprofe 3/04/2019  No comment

Ab Initio Unit: Alimentación y consumo de bebidas

This unit is simple to connect to working places, commands in Spanish, international mindedness through different types of food, recipes, etc.
An activity that is fun and works fine for this unit is the usage of realia to represent a play or a role-play in restaurants, grocery stores, etc.
Is also great to practice interactive oral skills with your students having them have conversations, dialogues centered in this topic.

Start with Quizlet to review/learn the vocabulary and then jump below to find activities ;)

Activities 

• Conecta el dibujo con la palabra [vocabulario visual]
• Crea tu menú para tu cumpleaños [Google doc]
• Vocabulario [pdf]
• Texto sobre comidas y horarios [pdf]
• Multiple resources for this unit [web]
• Online interactive unit [Junta de Andalucía]
• Unit planner for teachers [pdf]
• Packet with activities for students [pdf]
• Visuals and images for the unit [pdf]
• Organiza el diálogo: En el mercado [pdf]
• Kahoot sobre comida y bebida [web]

Lunaprofe 8/26/2018  No comment

ab Initio unit: Transporte

This unit about transports is inherently linked to Vacations, Technology & Environment but it is easy to connect with Daily routines as well.

Transportation is a perfect interdisciplinary topic that can be easily come up in conversations, texts or any other activities. So, to spend time on this always pays off to your students and their scores. Try to revisit these concepts when you are teaching other units that allow you to talk about this. Remember that re-utilizing something is a great way of helping your brain to recall information.

Presentation / Content

Oral activity

Teachers should guide without dictating

and participate without dominating

C. B. Neblette

Lunaprofe 1/29/2018  No comment

ab Initio Unit: La ciudad y sus servicios

This unit on cities is the perfect fit to start talking about directions, orientation, comparisons or descriptions. The Presentation below focus on Critical Thinking, Visual Thinking and is Inquiry based. The students will be guided through questions to understanding of concepts, ideas, vocabulary, brief projects, etc.

In ab Initio this is a great opportunity for practicing the Individual Oral and your Paper 2 / Written Assignment, your writing skills. The students might gather some good ideas for their Written Assignment too, as there is an important cultural component related to cities in different parts of the world.

If you have any idea(s) on improvements, changes, additions, etc for this unit, please let me know. I am always more than happy to revisit resources and update them.

Ahora relaciona estas palabras con el entorno urbano o rural

Por último, practica tu expresión escrita, selecciona uno de los tres temas que te proponemos y escribe al menos 150 palabras.

#Condicional #Comparar #Describir

Lunaprofe 10/02/2017  3 comments

ab Initio Unit: Entretenimiento

This topic is frequently related to the Individual Oral piece because is something real easy to bring up into a conversation. That's why I emphasize this skill when I teach this unit and my summative assessment is always on Individual Oral at least. 
It is also very common to see paper 1 activities on Leisure, Sports, Tourism, Vacation, etc which are very easy to connect to this.
That's why on this unit we are going to focus mainly on these two aspects of the Spanish ab Initio course.
You can find three reading comprehension activities below in Resources and one oral activity based on questions and answers in pairs and one more using a visual stimulus on Entertainment.

Before jumping into the activities it is highly recommended you study your vocabulary using the Quizlet provided below. You can start doing flashcards and as you learn more you can change the settings to play games with this vocabulary.

At the end of the post there are some images that can be used as visual prompts to start conversations in class related to our topic or used for oral activities

This Quizlet is set up as flashcards but remember that you can change it in the right-bottom corner using "Elige un modo de estudio".




Use this presentation to walk your students through the unit [I project it on the board]. We also use it to answer the questions related to vocabulary and export the text at the end of it, then my students submit it to a GDrive folder we have for our class. Doing this we are saving some paper and helping out a bit with being more environmentally friendly.

Resources:

- Vocabulario Entretenimiento [pdf]
- Ejercicio de vocabulario 1 [Vertaal]
- Ejercicio de vocabulario 2 [Vertaal]
- Ejercicio de vocabulario 3 [Vertaal]
- Juegos [Vertaal]
- Noticia: "La,la, land y todos los nominados a los Óscar" [Practicaespañol] [video]
- Noticia: "El ballet estadounidense Royalty ofrecerá una gala internacional en Cuba" [Practicaespañol]
- Noticia: "Cinco datos sobre la serie X-Men" [Practicaespañol]

These are some images you can use to teach vocabulary visually, start conversations, debates in class, etc:
1.- Founded on the Internet

2.- Founded on es-tema.de

3.- Created with WordArt: Questions related to Entertainment 

Lunaprofe 9/18/2017  No comment

ab Initio Unit: Salud

There are a million resources out there created by engaged and super motivated teachers to help us out in our classes. Sometimes I love spending time creating my own resources, to me it's the easiest and most convenient for my own classes as I can individualize and personalize my resources for my students, but also, we all have to admit that we don't have the necessary time to create or review all of our resources. Precisely then is when I use external resources, but remember if you want to make it right, make sure you cite/mention the original source of the activity or resource you are using.
This topic, Health, appears in all of the IB courses, ab Initio and Standard Level and HL.
Regarding the IB Profile and connections with this unit, we can clearly make a connection with the attribute balanced. In order to be healthy we have to be balanced, for instance with our diet. Nutrition and diet units are perfect to be taught within this topic.

Through Quizlet you can learn all vocabulary you need for this unit. Give it a try and remember that you can use it as flashcards, match, games (gravity), learn, etc. just clicking on the right corner at the bottom. 



On this online presentation you can find instructions and activities to teach/learn this unit:

Resources:

• Kahoot: Salud
• Online interactive Unit: La salud [Junta de Andalucía]
• Teacher's booklet [pdf]
• Student's booklet [pdf]
• Images [pdf]
• Actividad: Consejos para la salud [languagesonline]
• Actividad: Estoy enfermo [languagesonline]
• Ejercicio: Manchas de la piel [Vertaal]
• Ejercicio: En el consultorio [mhhe]
• Crossword: Enfermedades [Vertaal]
• Wordsearch: El dentista [jpg]
• Dialogue: Medicinas [jpg]
• Text + activities: La consulta del médico [Prof. Hamid Elmniai]
• Partes del cuerpo [Luna profe]
• Idioms related to Health [doc]

One more visual activity to review common mistakes and reflective verbs with vocabulary related to Health:

If you need to review the body parts for this unit, click here.

Related links:

• Body parts in Spanish
• IB Spanish SL Unit: Hombre precavido

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas. George Santayana

Lunaprofe 5/22/2017  No comment

Cultura / España / Pablo Picasso

If you want to talk about Hispanic Culture in the twentieth century, Mr Picasso is a must.
He is one of the most important artists and change makers of the past century. He reinvented his world and gave it to us as a gift.
He was a painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who went through crucial historic events and interpreted those for us making a difference in the art scene throughout the world.
Apart from his historic relevance, his life is full of surprising anecdotes and interesting facts that can engage our students in a fascinating trip on our past century.

The activity I propose here is an interactive timeline with important images and relevant information about each period of his life. In each stage you will find:

- related questions

- activities/projects/investigations for your students to research and find out more about this historic figure

More resources:

• Podcast about Picasso [B2 level]

I am always doing that which I cannot do

in order that I may learn

How to Do it

Pablo Picasso

Lunaprofe 4/07/2017  1 comment

Prueba 2: set #1

Remember that Paper 2 is going to weight 25% of your final score and it has two sections:

- A: choose one task out of two [50 words]
- B: choose one task out of three [100 words]

Also, it is crucial that we know the features of the text we have to write to score highly.

Instructions:
1.- Read the instructions carefully
2.- Choose your tasks and answer in the space provided
3.- At the end of the presentation click on "exportar el texto", a .doc file will download into your computer with the prompts and your writings
4.- Turn it in to your teacher
5.- Read his feedback carefully
6.- Come up with an action plan to improve and set a specific goal and time to review your progress
7.- Review your progress

More resources for Spanish ab Initio Paper 2:

• Rúbricas para tu examen
• Todo lo que necesitas saber sobre la prueba 2
• Formato: Tipos de textos [muy importante]

Sharing will enrich everyone

with more knowledge

Anna Monnar

Lunaprofe 4/03/2017  No comment

ab Initio Unit: Geografía

Geography is easy to connect with basic skills we need to develop in a language we are learning. Concepts like where, when, which, what... come up continuously and we can take advantage of these connections to take our students on a wonderful trip through language and content since the beginning of the learning journey.

This unit has been assembled keeping in mind specific ab Initio requirements but it is totally regular Spanish, AP Spanish, MYP... friendly. 


As usual, underneath you will find all you need to teach/learn this unit and as always, if you have anything you think can contribute in any way to this unit, please, send it through ;)

Everything you need: Unit planner [pdf] Essential Questions [pdf] Presentation based on inquiry with activities, explanations, projects, visuals and assessments [pdf] [main document for the unit] Presentation on Capitals of Central America [pdf] Presentation on Spanish-speaking countries [pdf] Interesting questions connecting Geography and Hispanic Culture [pdf] Skills: comparar [web] Map with countries, capitals and locations [pdf] Activity: Countries, capitals and locations [pdf] Oral activity: analyzing data and comparing countries [pdf] ¿Cuántas nacionalidades hay en mi escuela? [pdf] Reading Comprehension activity [pdf] [Paper1] Visual stimulus [Nationalities + Culture]  Benedetti's poem Te quiero [pdf] [Paper 2]

Want to learn more?

• Language through content: Geography [Antonio Luna]
• More Units [Antonio Luna]
• Thanks to Tara, Daphne, Adriano & Daily for working on the vocabulary on Quizlet, you are excellent students!

Teachers who love teaching

teach children to love learning

Lunaprofe 9/12/2016  No comment

Los pronombres complemento (I)

A mí me encanta dibujar, por lo que supuse que mis alumnos también disfrutarían dibujando cosas. No soy nada bueno, con lo que además de visualizar los conceptos mis alumnos se ríen un rato. Así que empezamos a dibujar en clase y los resultados son excelentes (en algunos casos). 

De todos modos, brindar la oportunidad de procesar a través de un dibujo un concepto gramatical a un alumno es una gran experiencia en tanto que plasma su propia idea y nos permite visualizar como de madura está esta idea en nuestra clase.


Esta figura gramatical adquiere especial importancia si estás estudiando el programa del Diploma, puesto que siempre aparece un ejercicio basado en este tipo de pronombres en la prueba 1, tanto en el nivel ab Initio como en el nivel medio.

Actividad 1
Después de usar la segunda imagen que adjuntamos ya sabemos que podemos preguntarle a la oración: ¿qué? para descubrir el CD [lo/la] o ¿quién? para descubrir el CI [le/les]. Ahora vamos a hacer una actividad para ver si lo hemos comprendido.




Actividad 2
Ahora que has organizado las oraciones, prueba a sustituir el CD y el CI por los pronombres complemento. 
Por ejemplo: 
Oración: Nuestra clase ganó el concurso. 
Pregunta: ¿Qué ganó nuestra clase?
Respuesta: el concurso.
Sustitución: Nuestra clase lo ganó.

Descárgate las imágenes en pdf aquí.

Actividad 3
Comprueba lo que has aprendido completando los huecos con pronombres complemento.


Quizás también quieras fisgar un poco por aquí:

• ¿Se dibuja la gramática?... María Estevez y Mª Ángeles Martínez [pdf]
• Uso de los pronombres complemento según la RAE [web]
• Actividad en línea. CVC. [web]
• Cumpleaños, regalos y complementos. Unidad sobre los complementos I y D. [pdf]
• Ejercicios en línea. Varios [web]

Lunaprofe 3/14/2016  No comment

Spanish ab Initio Internal Assessment

*Updated for first exams 2020

We have been talking about the format of the IA for Spanish ab Initio and the requirements that have to be followed. Today I want to analyze a bit more this assessment from the teacher perspective based on the structure provided in the Subject Guide (below). One of the most important things experience has taught me is that you have to practice this type of exam. Don't use always the same questions but you can try using same topics, similar kind of questions...

Supervised preparation time	The students receives two previously unseen stimuli, each relating to a different theme from the course and selects one for the presentation. Each visual stimulus must be labelled with the theme to which it relates (in Spanish).	15 minutes
Part 1: Presentation	The student describes the visual stimulus and relates it to the theme and the target culture(s).	(approximately) 1–2 minutes
Part 2: Follow-up discussion	The teacher engages the student on the presented theme, expanding on what  the student has provided in the presentation.	(approximately) 3–4 minutes
Part 3: General discussion	General conversation on at least one additional theme taken from the five themes.	(approximately) 3–4 minutes

What can I do to help my students score the highest on this exam?

Part 1

Presentation (approx. 2 minutes)

If you are a teacher make sure your visual stimulus comply with the guide's requirements. An effective visual stimulus may be a photo, poster, illustration or and advertisement. Any language that naturally appears on the image should be minimal and must be in the target language:

• is clearly relevant to one of the five themes in the course
• is culturally relevant to the target language
• offers opportunities for students to demonstrate their international-mindedness
• offers sufficient visual text for students to describe a scene or situation
• allows the student to offer a personal interpretation
• enables the teacher to lead the student in a wider conversation
• is relevant and of interest to the student's age group

The students must not see these stimuli prior to the examination.

The same five stimuli can be used for up to ten students sitting the examination. If there are more than ten students sitting the examination, two visual stimuli from each theme must be prepared. 

The following table provides an example of how the teacher may choose to distribute the visual stimuli to ensure that each student receives two stimuli, each relating to a different theme. Teachers may wish to have two copies of each stimulus available in the event that examination site arrangements require a student to be in the “supervised preparation” phase at the same time as a different student is sitting parts 1–3 of the examination.

Part 2

Follow-up discussion 

(approximately 3–4 minutes)

The teacher should then engage the student in conversation arising from the theme represent by the visual stimulus. This conversation should not be limited to a simple question and answer format.

We have to pay attention to the questions we make. Our questions should:

• seek clarification or extension of observations made by the student in the presentation
• invite the student to respond to ideas presented by both the visual stimulus and the teacher
• encourage connections and comparisons with the student’s other cultural experiences
• provide the student with opportunities to demonstrate his or her understanding and appreciation of the target language culture(s)
• encourage the student to engage in authentic conversation to the best of his or her ability.
• be open-ended questions in order to offer the student the opportunity for authentic engagement

• Some questions or phrases we can use to make sure our questions are relevant are:
• ¿Qué piensas sobre _____ ?
• ¿Qué te parece ____ 
• Desde tu punto de vista ____
• ¿Cuál es tu opinión acerca de ____ ?

Part 3

A general discussion (approximately 3–4 minutes)

The teacher should signal that they are moving to the final section of the individual oral assessment in order to prepare the student for the change of theme. The teacher may use a phrase such as:
Let’s now talk about other things
We’ll now talk more generally.
I’d like to ask you some questions about other things.

In Spanish:
- Ahora vamos a hablar de otras cosas.
- Me gustaría hacerte algunas preguntas sobre otros temas.
- Permíteme que te haga algunas preguntas sobre otros temas.


This section lasts 3–4 minutes and should:

• introduce at least one additional theme
• seek clarification or extension of observations made by the student in relation to the additional theme(s) broached
• invite the student to respond to ideas that arise in the general discussion
• encourage connections and comparisons with the student’s other cultural experiences
• provide the student with opportunities to demonstrate their understanding and appreciation of the target language culture(s)
• encourage the student to engage in authentic conversation to the best of his or her ability
• allow an assessment of the student’s interactive skills.

Have some dept budget? You might be interested in this ;)

Related links:

• All you need to know about Spanish ab Initio [web]
• Management of the Individual Oral [pdf]
• Resources based on the IB format [web]
• Rubrics for Spanish ab Initio [web]

What we learn with pleasure we never forget.

Alfred Mercier

Lunaprofe 3/07/2016  5 comments

Spanish ab Initio rubrics

We all have the IB language guides and we all have the same thought: It would be way easier to have this in a table or at least in a different format. 
Yeah! I had that same thought until I got bored of it and started just putting everything in a easier format to work with.
Then I couldn't stop myself there and I kept creating resources to complement the rubrics. Along with the rubrics I have been working on more documents that come in handy for multiple purposes.

Scope and Sequence: sometimes it is good to see how other colleagues plan their year out. 

Objectives & Assessment criteria: Just a list of them. 

Clarifications: these documents come directly from the IB, just to make easier to have a big picture of the paper. 

Connection home-school: this documents have a brief explanation of the paper (or exam), key information that families and students must know about it and more useful information like the word count or if they can or can not use dictionaries. Their purpose is to inform families and students at the beginning of Year 1, making sure they know the structure of the program and what our students are going to be required to learn and be able to do at the end of the program.

Descriptors for final scores: On this document you will find the descriptors from the IB to get to know better how a 7 looks like. 

IB Profile: Simple, here you'll find the IB Profile in Spanish with links to visual resources and activities ready to take to class. 

Syllabus: graphic organizers, schemes with the prescribed themes.

• Paper 1 Writing Connection homeschool  Rubric Tips on Paper 1 Rubric with suggestions by Álvaro Grana	Paper 2 Reading Comprehension 20 potential questions Connection home-school
  Paper 2 Listening Comprehension How to start out with listening comprehension tasks Important information for students and parents	Internal Assessment Individual Oral Rubric Rubric with suggestions by Álvaro Grana

If you have any documents that could contribute to this post, please, send them through! Spanish B? Check this post out!

Example isn't another way to teach, it is the only way to teach.

Albert Einstein

Lunaprofe 9/16/2015  6 comments