Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Spicing up Valentines Day

Do you have the winter blahs in your classroom?  Well, Valentine's Day is coming up soon and it's the perfect moment to re-engage your students with a few new activities.  Here are 10 Ways to Spice Up Valentine's Day in Your Classroom so that every kid leaves feeling the love.  We're language teachers, so we can teach whatever we want as long as the kids are using the target language.  Take full advantage of this and teach the kids some cheesy pickup lines, have them serenade another class, or try some speed dating.  Guaranteed good times!  To read all 10 ideas, click here.


Friday, January 1, 2016

SpanishPlans posts of the year

A great 2015 has come to a close. We started the year in South America and have since gone back to our classroom in Chicago teaching 8th grade Spanish. We highlight 5 of our top posts that we wrote in the past year that had the most views.


5. Top Reasons for and against Spanish Names:
Due to an earlier blog post, we re-opened the debate on giving your students names for Spanish class with this list of reasons for and a list of reasons against this practice. This was probably one of our most commentated posts of the year as well.

4. Spanish Webquests:
With more schools going 1-to-1 or the extended use of mobile devices, readers were interested in engaging their students with authentic websites to navigate. This post includes a web quest for clothes, food, house, soccer, and using an online dictionary.


3. Spanish Instagram:
We posted 40 authentic Instagram accounts for the Spanish classroom including accounts that post beautiful pictures from the culture, Spanish Memes, and famous accounts, among others. The use of this social media is growing as you can find many Spanish teachers on IG these days.

2. My Favorite Lessons:
Posted in the last days of 2013, this post talks about our five favorite lessons and how you can incorporate them into your class.

1. English Pop Music in Spanish
Seems like our readers certainly enjoyed finding covers of pop music including Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars translated to Spanish.

Closing: Encourage users to subscribe to your blog and what to look forward to in 2015.