Adios, no... Hasta pronto!

Hola T.A.L.K. parents!

I just wanted to thank you for participating in our program. Thank you for waking up so early every morning, and making sure the kids would be ready for their Spanish lessons. Thank you for your support throughout these months, and for participating in every activity. Thank you for those little details to show me your appreciation: the thank you cards, the cookies, the flowers, the delicious home-made fruit jams, and all the special details you sent me with your kids.
We hope your kids enjoyed learning a different language as well as we enjoyed teaching it! We look forward  seeing you again after the summer break, and to end, here are some last pictures to enjoy those great T.A.L.K moments:

Happy summer everybody! Felices vacaciones de verano!

Fruit names in Spanish

Aguacate, avocado. For some of them it was a surprise to know avocado is a fruit.

making animales in Spanish with clay - tortuga

making animales in Spanish with clay - ave

making animales in Spanish with clay - tortuga

making animales in Spanish with clay - serpiente

playing restaurant in Spanish 

ordering food in Spanish 

building la casa

casa terminada!

building la ciudad

learning vocabulary (ocupacion-lugar)

ciudad terminada

team work

It was a fun group to work with. Gracias!!!

canciones gratis

While looking for fresh songs to greet the children in the mornings, I found this great website from a Colombian project, Canto Alegre (Happy Song), with free songs in Spanish sang by children.

At first, I didn't recognized the project, but when I listened to the songs, I realized I grew up listening to those songs. It's a great project from a non-profit organization, so that's why the songs are free to download because they believe music should be free to be shared with everyone. If you're interested, please check out their great web site:
                                   http://musicalibre.com.co/

The page is in Spanish, so if you go to the tab "Descargas," you'll find the option to listen to or download each song, and the lyrics for each the song will be on the right side of the page once you had clicked on one song.

And, here's the link to their main page: http://www.cantoalegre.org/

Dia del Nino

I wish I knew about this before, but the celebration of El Dia del Nino with free programs supporting literacy at the libraries in Sacramento will last until April 30.
Here's the link if you're interested,
http://www.saclibrary.org/About-Us/News/2013/April/El-Dia-de-los-Ninos/

La ciudad

Hola a todo(a)s!

After two weeks of intense 30-minute work sessions, I'm very proud & happy to share the ending result of our project on building a small city. By a majority of votes, la ciudad was named: Hollywood. 

Along the way, we reviewed vocabulary on different places of the community such as: el hospital, la panaderia, el parque, la estacion de bomberos, etc. We also introduced the unit on occupations, which will continue into next week when we do our review on articles: la enfermera, el cocinero, la policia, etc.  All of the following ideas you'll see came from those little curious & creative minds:

La jugueteria (toy store) by Ken & El restaurante by Alee

Tyler helping to write the ocupaciones and the lugar (place) where they work

The pieces of clay on the road are not accidental. They are either: carros (cars) or estatuas .

Tyler made a big pancake-parking lot for La panaderia (bakery)

Their creativity goes to their smallest details: a football  made out of clay on top of  el estadio

Even though,  we introduced  a lot of vocabulary during the project,
making  the signs helped them to associate the names

A better view of una estatua (on the right) & extra decoration  for la panaderia. Do you see the croissants on the roof?

The tower for UCD implied some problem-solving skills for Luca because he had to figure out how to stand it without letting it fall.

Madi was very creative on making libros (books) para la biblioteca (library).

Sean also inspired us with his passion for sports. He created a very detail estadio with a score board and everything! Of course, you can tell what's his favorite team by looking at the score he wrote...

Ken has one of the greatest memories, I've ever seen!  Here, he's helping us to review the vocabulary.

Taking a break from building to review the vocabulary

   

Building, building, building!
Alee designed the sign for the name of our ciudad: Hollywood. See the final result in the final picture.

Discussing how to make people out of clay for the occupations in our town.

Writing signs in Spanish

The best part of projects: working as a team!

Last picture showing their work proudly. 

Review before the break

Here are some pictures of the extensive group work we did prior to our spring break. We review key lessons such as: colors, parts of the body, food, questions,and  days of the week.

It got so busy working in groups, that I just had time to take pictures of what we wrote on the board after the children were gone, but we did an extensive review. My favorite activity was making our own food bingo because the children didn't limit themselves to the words they already knew, but they also were very curious about asking about all kinds of common and unusual kinds of food... you'll understand better when you see the vocabulary they asked me by saying: Como se dice...?

Also, Get ready for our greatest project after the break: building our own mini-town to introduce two lessons: places of the community & occupations. Lots of fun, learning &  pictures coming up!!!

Beginning French DAC

If you are wondering what the beginning French class has been up to for the past few weeks, I can tell you that we have been quite busy!

A few weeks ago, we started learning about the house and associated vocabulary. We even constructed one of our own out of poster board, felt, and construction paper, and became artisianal furniture builders for a day or so. Unfortunately, I do not have a picture of the final product, but I can assure you, it was a beautiful home!

We also learned about modes of transportation. We took a mini field trip to Rainbow City to see if we could find all of the vehicles on our list, which included, in addition to the traditional ways we get around, a submarine, a rocket ship, a UFO, and a ship. We found everything, believe it or not!

We also played a variation on pictionary.

tout le monde en traîn de dessiner une fusée

Jackson's rendition of an OVNI (objet volant non indentifié, or UFO)

Maya and Chloe's renditions of an OVNI.

Last week, we started a restaurant to review all of the food vocabulary we learned a while back. We practiced ordering, created menus, and set the table.

The kids making their menus and currency to buy their food. Who knew the kids would learn how to make money in French class!

This week we are learning about adjectives. Today we learned about clean (propre), dirty (sale), pretty (joli(e)/belle/beau) and ugly (laid(e)). We played freeze tag with someone as a "mud monster" "sale" instead of "it", and the rest as "propre" with sponges. If someone is tagged, they are "sale" and have to freeze. The kids with sponges had to "scrub" the person with the sponge before they could start moving again. The kids were certainly tired today by the time 8:10 rolled around.

Los alimentos / Las comidas