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.

A Professor's Page

Barbara Kuczun Nelson, a professor at Colby College in Maine, has such a devoted following among her students that there is a Facebook fan club in her honor (seriously, see "Barbara Kuczun Nelson was sent from heaven").

Her Spanish Language & Culture website is clean, easy to use and full of resources for both teachers and students. Originally called Spanish Grammar Exercises, the site focuses on grammar points, which are listed neatly on one side for easy reference.

The cultural focus is pervasive. Authentic songs, stories and videos (with subtitles) from Spain and Latin America are used to introduce and practice grammar, with loads of audio and visual support, self-checking exercises and verb charts. There are mini-cultural lessons like this one sobre el Día de Los Muertos that would be great for classroom use, and time dictation exercises for students to review on their own.

A great resource for culture and grammar review!

Ideas and Inspiration

This fantastic blog is put together by "a linguist/Spanish teacher dissatisfied with the learn it, fight it, run from it, forget it second language process in the U.S. puts music and stories together to create a revolutionary language acquisition experience--in high school." What an inspiring byline! Posts include website links, homemade materials, lesson ideas, teaching advice and more for all levels and ages, though high school Spanish is her main focus.

There are so many interesting resources to utilize here. In the latest post, In the spirit of open source: Ciudad de las bestias, La Cuentista Profesora (as she calls herself) generously shares palabras claves and reading guides for all 20 chapters (!) of a book for adolescents by Isabel Allende. She includes a link to her Google Docs for accessing and printing the materials. This is for advanced, high school level students. As a huge fan of reading assignments for language students, I find this an amazing resource!

Another post provides a link to Nike's Spanish language website, along with her idea to use the "Nike shoe-builder" function as a personalized and extremely authentic activity with tons of visual cues in support of the language. The language is basic enough to be used for novice or perhaps intermediate students.

She's a prolific blogger, with nicely labeled posts that can be easily browsed under the labels section on the side. And I find her enthusiasm contagious!