Pop Culture and Creativity

I love finding passionate, inspirational teachers! Zachary Jones is a Spanish teacher in Georgia (the state, not the country) who started Actualidades: Learning Spanish Through Pop Culture. Besides its extremely hip design, this blog offers lots of great resources that really grab student attention.

There's a lot to look at here. Click on the extremely authentic and contemporary "Carteles de cine" on the right for a series of pelipareja activities in which students pair a short movie synopsis with its poster. These are printer-friendly and updated frequently. The activity seems like a pre-reading exercise more than a complete activity in itself, but would be a great jumping off point to set a context or build further activities.

I love using pop music to introduce students to a culture, and the ClozeLine section of the blog has songs from Mexico, Spain, Colombia, Puerto Rico and more. Each song has an accompanying sheet with a cloze exercise, highlighted vocabulary words, grammar points, cultural focus and comprehension questions. Wonderful and very fun!

There's LOTS to explore on this website- have fun! The site's creator is obviously enjoying himself as he blogs.