Wednesday, April 21

Hi everyone-

Sorry I'm posting so late, but I'm only just getting to the computer now. We had a good class today, and the consensus seems to be that Kara did a great job explaining the indirect and direct object pronouns, but that they would like to do even more review.

We spent the last 45 minutes of class going over these issues with some examples I had prepared. I went through in a step by step process in order to show how we get from "Ricardo da la torta a ti" to "Ricardo te la da." Thus, I showed them "Ricardo la da a ti" and even "Ricardo te la da a ti" before getting to the full substitution. I did another, similar example except this time with a third person indirect object pronoun in order to teach the "le lo" to "se lo" transformation. By the end of the class, the majority of students said they understood the pronouns, but they were pretty unanimous in hoping for another review.

At the beginning of class, we reviewed "gustar" in order to explain the "gustar type" verb "encantar" that appears in lesson 8, and I went over the preterite forms with them, including the stem changing verbs "preferir" and "dormir." I think they understand the basics of the preterite, but they need more exercises, if not full conjugations.

After this review, we broke into groups of three, and I had them construct a conversation about what they did yesterday using the preterite, gustar, and encantar.

Lastly, we spoke very briefly about rules of accentuation. I pointed them to the index (pgs 450-451), and I added the rules about strong and weak vowels. However, this was too quick, and it would be good to get them a basic handout with an explanation of accentuation.

Good luck tomorrow!
Tom