Saturday, July 7, 2012

Summer - Spanish 1

¡Feliz verano a toodos!

I hope your summer is and continues to be a good one.

As I promised, here are some helpful tips for staying fresh with vocab. and concepts from first year, as you ready yourselves for 2nd year in about 8 weeks. I know, a long time, but don't let the opportunity pass you by!

First off, if you are traveling abroad this summer to a Spanish-speaking country for more than 5 days, ¡quĂ© suerte! You have the chance to experience the language in many forms, and at different speeds. It's like being in a foreign-language classroom, only a lot more hours a day, and way more fun than any Spanish teacher could make it!

For the rest of us, stuck here in the greater 48, we need to make do with what we have here to maintain the level of proficiency we've gained so far. Lucky for us, we're in the information age. What that means is that we have access to a lot of educational resources that, previously, we had to travel to, or look up in obscure texts to find. A lot of language experience is at our fingertips. If we have the will, technology can help us find the way to a successful 2nd year.

So, let's start with the basics:

1) YOUR NOTEBOOKS: It never hurts to re-visit those vocab. lists / grammar notes pages for review. I recommend you keep your notebooks going forward into next year, as there might be concepts that we go over again entirely. Keep your notebook, and just copy and paste instead of re-writing.

2) YOUR TEXTBOOK: Sure, you turned in the physical copy, but the online version has vocab lists, grammar points, and even stuff about different countries we didn't even have time to cover last year. Go to http://www. vhlcentral.com, type in your passcode in all capital letters, and away you go!

3) QUIZLET: http://www.quizlet.com is probably the easiest and most useful flashcard-oriented site. It prompts you to generate lists, so you can focus on the words (or types of words) that gave you the most trouble in 1st year. Or, type "quizlet descubre 1" in a google search box, and various sites with practice lists will pop up for your perusal.

4) CONJUGUEMOS: http://www.conjuguemos.com is another good memory-based learning site, with several fun games. Typing in "conjuguemos descubre 1" should yield you positive results there. Unlike quizlet, however (which is free), conjuguemos has a fee for creating your own content.

More to come in future blog posts! Stay tuned!