April 5 - Reflections from Spanish class

As an extension of the former Spanish class, students expanded their knowledge of numbers from 1-10 to 1-20.  In order to make this meaningful, I taught it in the context of age.  All of the students are under 20 years of age, so this seemed to be a practical use of that number range.

Again, I had technology issues, but I resolved them quickly.  I used candies and numbers again, this time to introduce the word ‘querer’.  Students picked up on the ‘quiero – caramelos’ quite readily.  I felt it important to incorporate the very useful word ‘quiero’ in their limited instruction.  With that word and numbers they won’t go hungry when they visit Spain.

Numbers have dropped to 23, which my cooperating teacher took to mean that the language learning is becoming more complex as time goes on.  When I found out later that there was a basketball game at the same time and exams the next week, and since my class is entirely voluntary, I decided I shouldn’t feel too bad for the loss of 5 students.

I had planned to include a number race as one of my activities, but because of the limited space and the fact that students were not accustomed to such activities, it turned into a traditional two students write on the board Chinese-style activity.  This obviously was excluding the whole class from involvement because of the limited focus on two students at a time.  I was able to change the activity into a competitive whole-class activity by having students write the number on a piece of paper when I called out the number.  Students became very active with lots of competitive energy.  Then, I ramped up the challenge and started calling out numbers that they hadn’t learned.  Students were able to intuit numbers 20-30 because of the number patterns introduced from 10-20.

Again, I considered the transfer of information entirely in the target language to be a success.  At the end of class, one student came up to me and asked me if she correctly understood the meanings of certain phrases.  Teaching here is rooted in grammar-translation, so her request was not unusual.  Of course, she had accurately described the Spanish phrases with English words.  Students were able to effectively answer questions in the target language, demonstrating understanding as well.