Whether you are returning to the classroom or just finished alternative certification, you may be worried about your rusty spoken Spanish.
Here are the top four suggestions:
- You need to have plural commands roll of your tongue. Post them around the room. I sell one for $1.00 – you can make your own. These are stumbling blocks because usually when we learned Spanish we weren’t commanding people and so we didn’t use the form frequently. You will – with 30 students in front of you – so give yourself the visual reminder in class.
2. Script your classes. Make a flip chart with a slide for each activity in the lesson and write what you want to tell the students on it. Buy a remote presentation device so you can walk around the room and flip.
This remote will free you to walk around the room and stand strategically behind challenging students. It changes lives! If this sounds overwhelming, I have videos of my first week’s lessons here.
3. Save your voice and use musical transition videos to tell your students all the commands of the daily routine using Transition Videos. As you listen to the music of classroom words, they will help you to speak them. Students and you need about 50 survival expressions to function in the target language and I have those in music as well – they will seep into your sub-conscious.
Click on picture below to see what the transitions look like and how they establish class routines and minimize behavior problems. Since this blog was written, we created the Just Prep during Your Prep which may also help.
If you are rusty in French – no problem! We have the videos in French as well as the bare bones skeleton of the first month’s lessons. We also have 50 Survival expressions and are creating a desk copy for the students, and adding music with the spoken words to each survival phrase. Click here for previews.
4. Pick a telenovela to follow and watch it with subtitles. Develop a crush on one of the characters – it will help you get back in the swing of non-classroom parents for when you have to talk to the parents of native speakers.
