Friday, March 23, 2012

DAC Beginning French


Here is some art work from when we did les métiers. Our artist Chloe colored l'artiste. Christophe preferred to use one crayon, "macaroni and cheese" to color le médecin. Sam mixed Chloe and Christophe's techniques to color le coiffeur.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Beggining Español at Birch Lane

Hola, My name is Maria Angelica,

I am the Spanish instructor at Birch Lane Elementary.
It has been an accomplishment to see my six students learn shoulder to shoulder basic Spanish. We began learning greetings, introductions, and personal identity. We then moved to learn and practice commands and useful sentences in the classroom, colors and shapes, body parts, directions, numbers, days of the weeks and months.

The past two weeks we learned about animals: domestic, farm, and zoo/wild animals. This was a fun subject for all because they created sentences using an animal name, number and color. For example one of the created sentence was; "I have 100 hundred black monkeys"/ "Yo tengo cien changos negros" or "I have 35 blue skunks"/"Yo tengo 35 zorrillos azules." This type of activity promotes a fun, interactive and creative atmosphere.

Another favorite activity that my students love is the "timing" game. I time each student to say as much Spanish words as they can in 30 seconds. Some students are very clever and count numbers in Spanish to get as many words as possible and is valid. However, I challenge them by changing the rules and say only body parts, colors and shapes or using other previous concepts we have learn.

One of the things that is amazing about my class is to see how much each student care about one another. They help each other and help me promote fairness in the class. They are thirsty for knowledge and they motivate me every morning. Birch Lane students teach me as much as I teach them. I have my students take notes of new concepts and I noticed this helps them remember better for the next class.


Viva el Español at Birch Lane,

Maria Angelica

Sunday, March 11, 2012

Beginning Spanish at Korematsu Elementary

¡Hola! My name is Patty Barriga and I am the Beginning Spanish teacher at Korematsu Elementary School. I will blog every two weeks about activities and material we are learning in class. These letters will hopefully better the communication between the parents and the teacher. As always, I am open to suggestions and opinions to improve the classroom environment, so feel free to contact me at pbarriga@ucdavis.edu. Last week, we reviewed a couple of subjects such as body parts, feelings, clothing, colors and shapes to freshen up their memory. One activity that gets them ready to start the lesson is stretching. This allows them to review the body parts and directions as they each take their turn to say a stretch. When going over the feelings, we played charades which gets the students active as well. When reviewing the clothing items, I made them get into teams and they had to dress a stick figure with all the clothing pieces I wrote on the board. They had a lot of fun with this one, and they were able to interact and help each other. Competitions tend to be big on motivation. This week, we began learning conjugations of the verb "to have = tener." This material was a little dull for the students, but we managed to get through it. They were very interactive and asked many questions. They would ask for translations of word to create their own sentences using the new verb. As with many other languages, some things don't translate directly such as "Yo tengo __ años = I am __ years old." We went over irregularity, but it seemed like they understood it rather well. Next week, we will continue with the conjugation of the verb "to be = ser," which can also be challenging and tedious, but I will try to make it as engaging as possible. That is all for now, ¡Hasta luego!

DAC Beginning Spanish

Hello Everyone,
I am the beginning Spanish teacher in the Davis Art Center. The purpose of my blog is to inform parents and the community of what students learn in the T.A.L.K. program.

This past week students learned colors and clothing. One student would introduce his clothing along with the color of his clothing to the class. When that student would get stuck they would ask the class, "?cómo se dice        ? (How do you say?)" and a classmate would assist the student that was stuck. We also had art shows were students would draw a person with a piece of clothing and then pass the picture around so someone would contribute to the picture. In the end of the activity the students had pictures decent of a fashion show. :)

We also read a book, "Yo veo (I Spy)" where students would have to find objects amongst other objects in the page. This helped students vocabulary, grammar and numbers in Spanish. The students enjoyed reading along and finding the specific objects. I enjoyed reading this book because it introduced new worlds to the students such as, payaso (clown), estrella (star) and old worlds students had learned, such as animals and numbers and colors.

The activity students seemed to jump for joy was animal bingo. It was really exciting hearing students turn over their animal, name that animal and put the animal in their bingo table. Again, when students would get stuck they would ask the class for assistance, if everyone was stump I would step in. Who knew bingo would be enjoyed by these young students?

Spanish DAC Intermediate

Hola!

My name is Karla Fernandez and I am the spanish instructor for the Intermediate class at the DAC. I will be blogging every two weeks and I will talk about the material we have been covering in the past two weeks. If their is any suggestions or question you can always email me at kafernan@ucdavis.edu.

For the past two weeks we have been working on conjugation, reading and sentence structure. The conjugation take a while for the student to acquire, therefore I have been teaching it in small portions each week. Spanish has many grammar rules and one of them is conjugation therefore you will be hearing a lot about it but the student will be able to write perfect sentences in Spanish. Also we have been reading some books, the students seem to enjoy it very much. We each take turns reading each page and than after they have read I asked them in Spanish what the story was about. It definitely has helped them reading out loud because their pronunciation has improved.

We have also had some fun days thats involve playing games at the same time they are learning new vocabulary. One of them being competing on how many words they know, such as vegetables and fruits. The more fruits and vegetables each student gets the better. The students get in two groups and from their they ask each other by showing cards with the picture of the fruit or vegetable and they must say it in spanish. So far, the students are enjoying the class and they are improving their spanish.

It will be it for this time, Hasta pronto...Until next time.