As far as homework is concerned, I have been trying something new which has been successful so far. Basically I let my students do what they want as long as it is in Spanish!
At the start of the year I told them that they will acquire the Spanish language,
This school year I started to tell more stories TPRS style. I got no training at all so I do my own thing which seems to work well. I invent stories which are fun to listen to and easy to understand even for Spanish beginners. I already wrote some of the stories when I was on maternity leave and I used them with grade 6 and 7.
I am officially back to work after a wonderful holiday with my family in France and in Spain. It has actually been more than a week that I am back to school but it has been a shock to the system (getting back to the routine after more than a year of maternity leave!).
A few weeks ago, I was asking you for suggestions to order Spanish books for my school library. Over my teaching career, I have found that reading is a key skill, if not the main skill to learn a language. By reading texts and books, language “acquisition”
A picture can be a great start for a conversation when it is hard to get students talking in the target language. In my present school, we prepare grade 9 and 10 for the IGCSE exams and one part of the exam is about students having to converse with the teachers about different topics they have previously learned.
I am huge fan of the Michel Thomas method. The only thing that is bothering me is that it hugely relies on translation. I was trained to use the target language as much as possible in the classroom and my mentor taught me a few tricks to get the students to understand me in the target language like using lots of cognates.
I am hooked on Google+ at the moment and yesterday I read this short post from Yonatan Zunger: “This game is remarkably fun: You get five random images from Street View, and you have to try to figure out where in the world you are.