Tuesday, March 23

Here's an update from Kara about yesterday's class:
I went a bit rogue yesterday and deviated from the book. I figured it'd gotten to be a bit too late in the semester for the guys not to know certain basic vocab like body parts etc. So I made a worksheet that we filled out as a class of all the vocab for the face and body. We also talked about several verbs and other words that might be associated with the body (such as 'dolor de' and 'quebrar'). I then used this new vocab to have them practice comparative and superlative sentences, so they talked about whose hair was longer than whose, whose hair was longest etc. Some guys did really well at this and some guys could use some practice. They pretty universally write this stuff well because they have memorized the formula, but I think they could use some practice using these phrases in conversation.

We also worked on pronunciation of j/g/h which is in L6. I read them some news in Spanish about the healthcare bill and we translated it as a class as opposed to doing a dictation, so they could work on listening to these sounds and trying to derive meaning on the spot. We went over the gerundio and present progressive which they could practice today (I just got to put it up on the board for the most part). A couple of guys ended up leaving at 4:45 for chow and showers, but there was an overwhelming desire from 2/3 of the class to learn about the mi/ti/conmigo (etc.) pronouns, so a bunch of guys stayed late to learn about that. I hadn't prepared that lesson so I kind of rushed through it, but I did at least present it to a majority of the class. I think the fact that ella/el mean him and her in this context vs. she and he could be reviewed...

So now we are officially in L6, though I realized the guys never officially learned one last thing from L5, if you want to go over that- the tan...como and tanto etc. part. As for L6, there's a lot left, such as new stem-changing verbs and nadie/alguien etc. We are short a few L6 hw packets if you want to ask Jennifer to copy a few more. A lot of the hw they can't do yet because we haven't covered the material, but I assigned Exercise D on pp. 89-90 for today which goes over the present progressive if you want to go over them with that today