Spanish B Unit: El facebook de mi abuela

Unit titles must be engaging to gather students attention and awake their curiosity. I asked my students to think of a title for this unit and they came up with this super engaging title "El Facebook de mi abuela" which summarize perfectly what this unit contains.
Although the IB states the possibility of just choosing two options by the teacher we always see all of them. To me it just makes sense, the more you offer your students the more opportunities they will have to do better in their exam. There is no need of doing a super long unit on each topic. When it comes to this you can do mini-units or "express units" comprising vocabulary, main concepts and ideas and give them a sense of what is that option about.


For a full understanding of how to teach this unit, please read the unit planner and if you still have any question/doubt don't hesitate to reach out. If you develop any other materials for this particular unit, please share them so we can add them to the list below.

All you need to teach/learn this unit:  Essential questions [pdf] Vocabulary [pdf] [Quizlet] Unit Planner [pdf] Visual stimuli [images] [Interactive Oral] Activation of prior knowledge [pdf] Activity to work the subjunctive [.doc] [Antonio Gallardo] Skill: compare [pdf] Writing [pdf] [Paper 2] Article: Inventions del nuevo milenio [pdf] [Paper 1] Interactive activity [Edpuzzle] Making predictions [pdf] Presentation to compare evolution of different items [pdf] [made by students] How am I going to be assessed? [pdf]

Interested in more units? Click here ;)

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There are worse crimes than burning books.

One of them is not reading them.

Joseph Brodsky

Lunaprofe 8/19/2016  4 comments

Los meses del año

Foundations are crucial to build up a solid knowledge, but connections are equally relevant to internalize it and make it ours. When you are learning the months of the year in Spanish you can also talk about:
- Days of the week
- Calendar [different types of calendar, religious calendars, roman calendar...]
- weather
- seasons
- cultural traditions or celebrations related to a specific month
- ... 
You can get started with the activity below to familiarize with the names of the months and the order.
Activity:
Organiza=Ordena=Enumera los meses del año.


If you like music and find motivational learning/teaching with music, there is a well-known song associated to the months of the year in English that you can adapt to Spanish. Your students will appreciate this type of activity in your class to break the ice or to finish the class. Something I usually do in my class is first I sing the song for them. Then we sing it together and from then on we assign a different student for each class who will lead the class singing this song. This little responsibility helps them build confidence, public speaking, leadership and help them realize how difficult is to lead a class with a several human beings.

Connection:  "Los meses del año" + "Las estaciones" [comparar] Along with this activity your students can answer questions like: ¿cuándo es invierno en tu ciudad? ¿enero? ¿abril? ¿julio? ¿cuál es tu mes favorito? ¿con cuál estación se corresponde? ¿por qué es tu preferido? ¿en qué mes naciste? ¿qué estación era? ¿hacía frío? ¿calor? Puedes preguntar a tu familia para recopilar esta información.

Activity:  Writing to practice comparisons + seasons in Spanish. Get it here [pdf]

Activity:  Quiz on Month sayings [online]

Want to know more?

• How to write months in Spanish correctly  [pdf]
• Cultural activity: Las 12 uvas [pdf] [borrowed from Spanish Playground]
• Comparisons and seasons in Spanish [pdf]

= is a symbol we use for synonyms. 

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education.
Albert Einstein

Lunaprofe 5/04/2016  No comment

Noun gender in Spanish: Special rules [compilation]

We know that life is not that easy as we learn a rule and everything works just great. We know it's a little bit more difficult than that and so are languages. 
We've seen in previous posts some interesting tips and rules to learn the noun gender in Spanish, but still we'll find more nouns ending in a different letter that doesn't apply to any of those. Now it is the time to get a little deeper into it. Everything in a language has a reason to be, but we don't need to explore all of them to learn basic Spanish.
The poster attached to this post is a simple summary of special rules applying to noun gender in Spanish, but to make them more accessible to our students we can work with it in different ways (to diversify is always a great choice).

We can group them by gender, like:

Generally, a noun is masculine in Spanish if it ends in:

• - o: el 
• - or: el amor, el olor, el dolor, el amargor, el anterior, el sabor, el ardor...
• - aje: el coraje, el paisaje, el garaje, el masaje, el mestizaje, el dopaje... 
• - ema: el problema, el tema, el lexema, el esquema, el poema, el sistema...

Regularly, a noun is feminine in Spanish if it ends in:

• - a: la casa, la almohada, la aceitera, la anchura, la daga, la 
• - dad: la normalidad, la ciudad, la verdad, la cavidad, la nulidad, la disponibilidad, la diversidad, la deportividad, la exclusividad...
• - tad: la libertad, la amistad, la lealtad, la tempestad, la pubertad, la facultad, la voluntad, la enemistad, la deslealtad, la majestad...

We can also give our students a list of nouns and ask them to group them by masculine or feminine in two different columns:

tema, mano, masaje, olor, árbol, amistad, canción, igualdad, libertad, problema, radio, garaje, amor, función, maternidad, lealtad, día, moto, peaje, sabor, condición, nocturnidad, mitad, sofá, foto, paisaje, error, formación, paternidad

Masculine nouns	Feminine nouns
el error	la paternidad

Check with this "The odd one out" [in Spanish: encuentra al intruso] your understanding of what we have been talking about:

Check your answers

Children must be taught HOW TO THINK,

not what to think.

Margaret Mead

Lunaprofe 12/05/2014  No comment

Using Google forms to practice conjugations in Spanish

The time is now. We are going paperless in our Spanish class, inspired by our eco-units and the eco-school organization we try to use less and less paper in our class as we can. This is a personal and professional challenge that I feel ready to accept and my students seem to be ok with it too.

Remember: 15 trees are needed to make 1 ton of paper.

Lunaprofe 10/21/2013  No comment