Week 8

March 1, 2011

After having a week off of school everyone was readjusting to a normal schedule and remembering what we had been studying before our “break”. We spent the beginning half of the week continuing to work with vocabulary and culture that we had been studying.

I have been working hard on keeping my student’s focus and interest. This is definitely a challenge because 15 year olds have a lot of things on their minds, and Spanish is usually at the top of the list. I have been trying to create and do multiple activities so that the students do not get bored of one thing. I think that I did better with that this week. Students seemed to be more interested. I also have been trying hard to relate the information to their own lives and to get invested in their lives. The students enjoy talking about themselves, their likes and dislikes, etc. It is difficult with Spanish 2 because the students can only express so much with their limited language skills. So I have been trying to make the information personal and interesting to my students.

March 4, 2011

This has been a long week. We had our first full week in a long time, and I was pretty exhausted. The students are doing great catching up and keeping up with the new information. We have been working on vocabulary, culture and grammar this week. Today John and I experimented with iClickers and were able to use them with the students for a fun activity. The language department has two sets of iClickers that can be used. The students really enjoyed using the technology and trying something different. I think we will use them again this week because they enjoyed it and it was a great review activity for the culture we had been studying. There were some technical difficulties during first period but it all worked out the rest of the day. With stuff like that we just had to work on our feet and luckily we had second period prep so we were able to play with it then.

I have still been working on my LAMP and should be starting that in the near future. Once I have that unit taught and the BSU side of it turned in I will feel a lot better and relieved. This week is Ball State’s spring break, but I have my high school’s spring break the first week of April.