Minute by Minute Spanish – Spanish Lessons

Venezuelan Current Events Activities for Spanish Class Students

February 17, 2019 By Personal thoughts and beliefs of E.B.Shrager - do not represent those of any past or current employer.

Download this free activity to help your students understand the struggle with water in Zulia, Venezuela

current events venezuela22 from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

Current Events in Venezuela 2019

How can you make today’s Venezuelan Crises concrete for Spanish students?

Price of Food and Wages

Students predict how many hours they would have to work if they lived in Venezuela and received minimum wage.

Students predict prices for a typical household of five’s necessities. They can do this for three dates, January 31st, February 6th, and February 13th.

Price of Education

Students read prices written in words and write the numerals on a work sheet and calculate from bolivares to dollars. Students discuss the implications when they do the same for the father’s wages.

Agua en Venezuela

Students read the difficulty that Cristina has to bring a water bottle to school. Free download.

All net proceeds go to three Venezuelan families. Help support their education and keep them well-fed and with medicines when they need them.

Once a year I send them used clothing from my family and colleagues at school.

If you are interested in Venezuela, you may like this song about immigrating to Colombia.

You may also be interested in the Venezuelan National Anthem Video and booklet.

Click here to help them.

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Thanks for Visiting For the Minute by Minute Spanish!

Spanish Class Social Skills _ New Student _ Interrupting _ Emails _ Congrats _ Random Partners _ I’m Not Your Dictionary

January 14, 2019 By Personal thoughts and beliefs of E.B.Shrager - do not represent those of any past or current employer.

Social Skills Videos:

Finally, to teach social skills in Spanish class, I have created six musical videos sung in Spanish to demonstrate these skills. The first is how to treat a new student in class. It includes offering to escort the new student to his or her next class, offering to eat lunch together, sharing recent classwork, and welcoming them to the class.

The second is how to write an email to a teacher, reminding students to use querido, atentamente, por favor, gracias and their names.

The third is the most important, asking if now is a good time before just talking at the teacher with different requests.

The fourth is the expected behavior with random partners and working with other students and the fifth is how to congratulate someone. The sixth is a catchy song that tells your students you are not their dictionary. It is a playful reminder to look up the words they should know rather than just rely on the teacher to be their dictionary.

Using direct instruction of these social skills has improved my happiness in the classroom and reduced my sense of ‘burn-out’ ; I used to be annoyed that so many students were learning their social skills from apps and not from interaction with caring adults.

Here are snippets – they are copyrighted so only a sliver is shown. Please read below to see how all net proceeds go to support three Venezuelan families.

Purchase here.

_47 Bienvenidos Pls no posting – trimmed from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

Querido Estudiante from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

Purchase here.

Video 64 – trimmed from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

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_13 Quién Será Pls no posting (1) – trimmed from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

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MBMS52 En hora buena t from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

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no soy tu diccionario_final – trimmed.mp4 from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

Purchase here.

Spanish Teacher Dilemma – Creating Comprehensible Input for All when All Have Varying Comprehension Experiences and Skills

September 10, 2018 By Personal thoughts and beliefs of E.B.Shrager - do not represent those of any past or current employer.

What you can do to make Comprehensible Input truly Comprehensible for classes with a Wide Variety of Comprehension Experiences.

A teacher asked, “How do you keep CI truly comprehensible when some students come from previous teachers who used mostly English, some students from previous teachers who used Spanish but in such a way that students didn’t understand and tuned out, and some students from previous teachers who use the target language and can follow along?”

I teach such a class of Spanish One, part Two to eighth graders!

I am a big believer in providing engaging visual and audio and musical CI in every lesson every day. I script the lesson in what I call a daily tech guide.

I make a flip chart for each day and provide visual slides for each activity. (You can use PPT, Smart, Active Inspire, whatever projects onto your board.)

I insert a musical transition video before each activity and soon students are using the words in the videos to express themselves. We are able to stay in the target language because those who had teachers last year who didn’t use Spanish that much in the classroom rely on the visual for cues, those who heard Spanish but didn’t understand read the words to the videos, and those accustomed to hearing classroom Spanish rely on listening to the videos.

I have them check in with their seat partner for understanding.

_85 Chequeen con tu compañeroT from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

It levels the playing ground!

I use a clicker or remote mouse to be anywhere in the room during the lesson.

This remote will change lives! — This remote will free you to walk around the room and stand strategically behind challenging students. It changes lives!

If you want to see some examples of my lessons, try these links.

Videos of First Week’s Lessons

Videos of different classes.

If you want to see how to structure your lesson using the transition videos, go here.

You can help some starving Venezuelans — All net proceeds go to help three Venezuelan Families to survive their economic crises.

Spanish Class Password Frase Secreta Frase de la Semana Video to Introduce Concept and Stay in TL

September 10, 2018 By Personal thoughts and beliefs of E.B.Shrager - do not represent those of any past or current employer.

Many Spanish teachers build a sense of community by using a special phrase or word as a password to enter the classroom. Each week teachers introduce a different one. They do so in the target language by playing our 27 second video to transition into the announcement of our next ‘frase secreta de la semana’ – your students will quickly grasp what to do and will remember to note the latest one when they hear the music. It also provides the vocabulary for those who don’t know the secret phrase – see lyrics below.

La Frase Secreta – Profesora from ellen shrager on Vimeo.

Click here to purchase female teacher version.

Click here to purchase male teacher version

Here are links to different Spanish ideas if you are looking for inspiration for Passwords.

Spanish Proverbs

40 Beautiful Words in Spanish

Tongue twisters for more advanced students

Top Ten Foods From Spain for Food Unit

Top Ten Beaches in Spain

For more ideas, Bryce Hedstrom has written a book on Passwords.

Spanish Teachers’ Phone Policy for Gen Z When Admin Refuses to Create a Uniform Policy.

July 28, 2018 By Personal thoughts and beliefs of E.B.Shrager - do not represent those of any past or current employer.

Transition Videos tell the students what to do in a fun, catchy way that minimizes oppositional defiance issues.

T’is the tricky season for setting your phone policy for the year if you teach in a school where rules aren’t enforced. FaceBook pages for teachers are filled with some teachers talking about their phone caddies while other teachers lament that their school won’t support them because of legal liabilities for the phone. Socio-economics plays a part here – many of my students can’t afford phones and the public display of who has and who doesn’t have a phone can be humiliating.

It is tricky because the students in your class were born watching their parents use their cell phones as watches, as agendas, as cameras, as dictionaries, as calculators and as help raising them. It is trickier because in my seventh and eighth grade classes, the people texting my students are . . . their parents. Parents are comfy texting their children all day long and don’t wait to see their children at the end of the day to talk about what happened. This is such a problem that I wrote a blog about the damage this causes.

Putting away the phones can be the new battleground for testing the teacher’s authority, and a daily struggle for teachers who have students with oppositional defiance issues. But last year, I finally accepted their love for their phones and made it part of the routine of putting them away and taking them out.

What a difference it makes for the video to be telling them to put them away and not me! It removes me from being the target of defiance as students all jokingly urge one another to say goodbye.

It has become such a routine that my phone issue went away. I make a daily flip chart or slide show for my class. I insert a slide for each activity we do and transition videos such as the phone videos in between the slides. I use a remote mouse or presentation device (“clicker”) so I can be anywhere in the room.

Here is my blog of all of my transition videos.