I found a 1978 SCDC Spanish Curricula Units box that was going to be thrown away. I am always looking for "new" materials and so I opened the teachers edition up and found page 145 where it said to write palo, miel, cama, mesa, nube and the read:

Había una vez un viejo malo/ que andaba con un _________.
Tengo un amigo fiel/ tan bueno como la ________.
Toñito tiene fama/ de saltar en la _________.
Es tanto lo que pesa/ que se rompió la ___________.
Tan alto Nino sube/ que se sente una _________.

Along with talking about using a franelógrafo which is what the authors called the flannel board (for you young people, teachers used to stick pictures made of flannel on a board made of flannel to tell stories) I found a worksheet to mimeograph that had the following word match:
rica  boca
toca  beso
pide pica
mesa  jugo
Hugo  mide

I thumbed through it and the pages were falling out at the spine. It included the pictures what are part of a series of books that were in another box that was/is going to be thrown away. I can't let it go just yet. There are kids in my class room that don't have books at home, and though they are dated, they are easy to read. I had to laugh at the title of one of the stories Pollito Pito, because of the double meaning of pito in Spanish. I don't think I'll send that book home.

I am going to look into see if this series has been updated to include newer pictures and stories.

Tech ideas for my grade level groups

Since I work with kids at all six levels at our elementary school I am going to overview what technology I see kids using at my little school on a regular basis.

In kindergarten the kids all have a chance to do a program called Zip Zoom. It is meant to be comprehensible English for students that don't speak English at home, but most all the kids play it because they learn mousing skills and onset vowel sounds.

 Last year my kindergarten group of 7 kids made an ABC book in MSWord, copying and pasting pictures from a bank that I created. I actually had them print the pictures and  paste them into a cardboard blank book to take home and keep. They used Photo Story to recreate the book and record their voices.

This year the schedule was different and i didn't have one single group that came to me daily, I had groups of five - seven kids that came to me on a rotation.The "conversation" group mostly uses realia to prompt speaking in complete sentences. Sometimes they can take turns on an iPad I bought that has a couple of programs from Montessori that teach letter sounds and how to form them and number sense games. I also got some of the Smart Baby programs that have flash cards to learn vocabulary. As squirmy as they often are, they can generally focus on what the other students are doing on the iPad when it is not their turn. It is pretty motivating. I hope we can get a couple more.

Tabajando con palabras

Near the beginning of the year we started rotations with students learning to read and write in Spanish. I have paper letter tiles and plastic "benches" to sit them on and I have the students build words. Here are some of the sequences I used. Sometimes I ask them what I have to do to change the word on the bench to the next word, and sometimes I tell them what to change.

Here is a shortened version of the directions. Use the first line as the example: Escriban la palabra mi, como en la oración Es mi perro. Mi. Ahora, quiero que quite el vocal y cámbialo al vocal "e". ¿Qué palabra es? Me. Sí! Cambia la primera letra, el consonante a un "t". ¿Qué palabra es? Te. Sí!  Ahora, quite el vocal y cámbialo al vocal "i" . ¿Qué palabra es? Ahora deja ti al lado izquierdo. Escriba la sílaba "to" al lado derecha. Juntalas dos partes, ¿Qué palabra es? tito? Es un nombre de alguien. Debe voltear la "t" para que sea mayúscula. ¿Qué nombre tenemos si cambia el "i" a "o"? Toto, muy bien. ¿Qué palabra tendrías si pongas un "n" entre las dos sílabas? tonto. Sí. ¿Y si cambia los vocales a "a"? tanta. Cambia la primera "a" a "o". Cambia la "o" a "i".

I find that I can see which students have difficulty or are very quick with left /right, first/last, vowel&consonant (they are different colors so that helps), tracking left to right, sound/letter names. In the lowest level learners, I take away the letters all together and just work on hearing the sounds in words.

mi-me-te-ti-to-Tito-Toto-tonto-tanta-tonta-tinta-pinta-cinta-quinto-pinta-pintura-cintura-cura-curita
puma-espuma-pluma
Toto-tonto-tono-mono-monto-moto-foto-roto-Rita-quita-queso-quepo
va-chiva-chivo-chivos
va-chiva-viva-vida-visa
va-chiva-Chava-ccharla-ala-sala-alas-sala-sola-ola-olla-silla
cosa-rosa-risa-pisa-tisa-masa-mapa
su-tu-tus-tio-tios-tias-mias-misa-tisa-risa-sonrisa
oruga-tortuga-corre-torre-toro-topo-topa-ropa-sopa-sola-bola-hola-halo-hallo
pin-sin-cine-cisne-tina-pina-espina
pato-Pati-pato-zapato
frente-gente-siente-diente
blusa-bloco-loco-toco-toca-troca-roca-ronca
martillo-anillo-zorrillo-zorro-porra-mora
tio-frio-fria-fruto-fruta-frente-mente
roca-troca-truco-trozo-trampa-trompeta
tía- fría-frío-tío-amarillo-martillo

I am at elementary school so the topics that this site offered were just a little too mature for my little ones, but I liked a lot of them and had I been working with 11-13 year olds I would have been able to foster some great conversations and writing: http://www.tweentribune.com/content/tweentribune-classroom

When I did teach that age group, I predominately used movies, first my favorite legends and fairy tails, then movies on the topics that they were studying in their regular education classrooms, grade level curriculum. I would pre-teach some of the vocabulary that they would need, and we would stop the movie to check for understanding. Students would do their best to summarize and at first, I had to do a lot of think aloud and write as I spoke, adding the most important or enduring vocabulary. Then I would make a "cloze passage" removing every fifth or sixth word. I would list the missing words at the bottom of the page and they were expected to write the word in their native language (mostly Spanish speakers where I am and one Chinese family that would have to check that themselves, because I don't know Chinese, yet).
We used the same piece of writing to practice speaking and I would teach how a sentence can be made into a number of different questions.

Why did I do that? Because I couldn't find materials 20 years ago that appealed to that age group! They loved playing pictionary and hang-man with the vocabulary. Come to think of it, that was really fun. My older kids might like to do that.

Tuner for the guitar

www.howtotuneaguitar.org

second grade transition and kindergarten phonemic game

At the beginning of January I started to transition the dozen or so kids that are still reading the Houghton Mifflin Lectura series in Spanish into English. We started with the Visualizing and Verbalizing structure words that we had been doing for writing and I modeled the English every other day. Then at the end of January, at the beginning of the second semester, I quit the daily writing. Now we read the story from the basal in Spanish and discuss the meaning of words and follow the questioning strategies that are in the teacher's manual and that's pretty much all the Spanish they will get until we have read the story twice and I ask them to write a journal entry about the story or something the story made them think about.

Then the other half of their time we are reading English from the Early Success series. I chose the first level so that they could hear the rhythm and rhyme. On Fridays and Mondays all year, they have been doing Zip Zoom and have "graduated" to RAZ kids. Most of the kids have finished level 3 of Zip Zoom by second grade and are ready. I feel pressured to exit kids from Spanish if they can read and understand well so that they can get started with the dominant culture's language. What I find is that the students that aren't exited are often the ones that have some kind of learning issue. They don't hear all the sounds in Spanish (L1=first language) which is completely phonetic, and then they end up struggling in English (L2=second language) too, because they don't hear all the sounds in this language, either.

For intervention for the kindergarteners, (groups of five or six) I have adopted the practice of using little plastic toys that they name. I use about a dozen items that sit on the desk in front of me. I have plastic tiles that I touch (kids are facing me, so I go right to left) as I say the sounds in the words. In the beginning after I say all the sounds, if I don't get any response as to which item I might have said, I go back and group the tiles in the syllables. I have tried a number of different ways to respond and I like to switch it up. The first time I did it, I allowed the students that thought they knew to say it. Then I started handing out the plastic toys and if they had two toys they couldn't say the word anymore. For a couple of weeks now, I have been trying another response so that they don't just "shout out" the answer, I have them listen to the sounds and put their thumbs up if they think they know the word, I count to three and they say the word in a chorus. I see who is leading and following. It is the same kids that didn't get two toys right away. The game is that with five year olds, someone always forgets and blurts out the answer, so I put the toy back in the bucket for "me" and if no one shouts out, "they" get the toys in front of them.

If you read this and you think you would try something that has worked for me, please write me a message. I am fairly certain, I am mostly writing this to myself and processing what I have done that seems to be fun and working too.

http://ksquirkyteacher.wordpress.com/2011/02/14/tips-from-the-super-organized/