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!