lesson ideas

As usual, I ran across this resource as I was spending a bit of time this morning on Twitter. Happy Hour Spanish is a fairly new site (2011) that features videocasts, podcasts and exercises to help you learn Spanish and about the Spanish culture. Hayley, a California native, was a student of Maider who was teaching classes in Bilbao (her native city) when they decided to start the Happy Hour

El mundo con eñe is a new free magazine available online. The first one is about Argentina – covering topics such as literature, music, movies, recipes and more. Each article is given a reading level from A1 to C1. (Look for the number of aliens near the top of each page… yes, aliens.) Also throughout the articles certain words are highlighted which can be found in the glossary section near the

Back in June 2008 I wrote a post about Salsa, an elementary Spanish language and cultural series from Georgia Public Broadcasting. During the last few years I remember checking the link at various times and noticed that either the videos weren’t available or they were only viewable on a small screen. Just today I saw on the Freely Educate blog that there was a post about the program, so I had to

Just saw on Spanglish Baby’s Facebook page that José-Luis Orozco has a new site: Caramba Kids is developing a new and innovative education program based on the music of renowned bilingual educator Jose-Luis Orozco. Our team consists of award-winning experts in animation, music, technology and early childhood development who are committed to the development of exciting educational content for

I subscribe to the Annenberg Learner newsletter which is always full of information for teaching a wide variety of subjects. In this particular issue, there is a section about El día de los muertos (Day of the Dead). Here is the link to the activities including slideshows in English and Spanish, a teacher guide and more: http://www.learner.org/jnorth/tm/monarch/DiaMuertosTG.html  If you don’t

I’m totally addicted to the show, Destino: España, on RTVE. I ran across the program via the RTVE app on iTunes. During each episode you meet several people from various parts of the world (from Togo to Mongolia and everywhere in between) who have chosen to set up residence in Spain. They talk about how long they’ve been there, introduce their family and friends, visit various parts of their

A reader brought to my attention the fact that the link for my post about free thematic units in Spanish and other languages did not work anymore. After a bit of research, I discovered that the pages were archived. The new link is: http://wayback.archive-it.org/855/20101103145624/http://nflrc.iastate.edu/pubs/units/unitsList.html  I will fix the link on the original post, but since I thought this

You know when you find one great website which then leads to another website and so on? Well, on the Practica Español site, I found a series of videos from the Fundación de la Lengua Española called Adivina. From the site:"Adivina" es un diccionario básico del español en formato audiovisual con definiciones aportadas por niños españoles. Creado con el fin de fomentar el aprendizaje del idioma con

Through the CASLS (Center for Applied Second Language Studies) newsletter I learned about a fairly new online magazine totally in Spanish called VeinteMundos. Here’s the information from their site: Journalists from Spain and Latin America write interesting reports and articles about everyday life and culture in their homelands. Alongside, Latinos tell us about their experiences in Europe,

Today the folks at the Foreign Language House posted a great resource on their Facebook page. Whistlefritz, which produces immersion-based, award-winning CDs and DVDs now have made lesson plans available for free on their website: Whistlefritz® DVDs teach Spanish using a multi-sensory approach: children hear, see, speak, and move to, Spanish. As every parent and teacher knows, repetition is the