I remember how excited I was to take Spanish in 9th grade. I could not wait. I guess I thought it would be all fun and games. It wasn't. It was all conjugating and verbs and a condescending teacher. I did not like it at all BUT I was determined to take it for four years because I knew I wanted to go to Spain one day. I learned that in geography class in 7th grade when the teacher shared pictures. I suffered through Spanish 1 and 2. I'm not sure I learned much - just some lists of words that I couldn't string together in a sentence and how to conjugate verbs. I didn't know what the verbs meant but I sure could conjugate. Then my teacher got pregnant. She took my entire junior year off and we had a substitute. I can't remember her name but I can picture her. She didn't know a word of Spanish and back in those days there was no internet with amazing lessons. So she learned along with us. We listened to music. ON CASSETTE TAPES. If you're old enough, do you remember how they would write the lyrics on those little foldable covers? I'm not sure my eyes could even read the words today because they were so so so small! Mrs. Substitute Teacher brought in tons of tapes and told us to choose one. I chose the Mecano tape. She told us to listen to it and to choose a song that we liked. We all spent the class period sitting on the floor and listening to cassette tapes of random Spanish music groups/singers. The next day we went to the library and looked at books (encyclopedias too) on the country where our singer/group was from. We wrote up a big report on that country. I found it fascinating. Of course, Mecano was from Spain so I was researching my dream destination! A few days later we were told that we were going to figure out what the song we chose was about. My song was Mujer contra mujer. Talk about a controversial topic in 1988!!! But I figured out what the song was about with a Spanish/English dictionary (thankfully there was no Google translate back in the day). I learned more from deciphering that song and seeing those verbs and nouns and punctuation marks than I ever learned from a vocab list. I was hooked. This substitute teacher with no knowledge of Spanish had taught me so much from music. The teacher happened to have an art major so what do you want to know about Spanish and Latin American art? I STILL remember! We watched a lot of videos on the different countries that year too. The CULTURE is what made me fall in love with the language. It made me want to learn the language. It made all that boring conjugation work have meaning. We have to add culture to our lessons EVERY SINGLE DAY. As you've probably already read, I am currently teaching for an online school full time. I have students from grades 2-12 but I am responsible for teaching live lessons for only Spanish 1 (my colleagues teach the other levels and my students go to their live lessons...it's messy but it works). Basically my students work online asynchronously. If they have questions, they shoot me a message or make an appointment. The curriculum is boring vocab lists and grammar. I feel so bad for them. Luckily, there's also quite a bit of cultural readings to spice things up. But sadly, those cultural readings are mostly in English. Anyhow, when I see them for their live lessons I make sure to teach the grammar in the most comprehensible way I can and I ALWAYS sneak in culture. I've created Google Slides presentations that teach the grammar, practice it quickly and then the students are whisked off to some far away Spanish speaking country! It's magical. I have a very short video at the end of each of these presentations of the country. We were learning Tú Commands last week and that one is in Cuba. While we were watching the video, a student typed in the chat that she felt like she was there. After the video, all of the students wanted to know more about Cuba. The questions were amazing! I know I'm sparking something in these kids. They may not all go on to be linguists but if I can instill an interest in different cultures and different peoples, I've succeeded. You can find two of these Spanish Grammar/Cultural Slideshows (as I named them...clever, huh? LOL) on my Linktree above (or HERE). These are free for you to use anytime. Although sometimes I switch them out with others. At this moment the two that are on there are the Imperfect (in Colombia) and Gustar and similar verbs (in Costa Rica). I have 28 grammar topics for sale in my TPT store as well. Culture, my fellow teachers, is the best way to hook your students. And for those of you who love Mecano, like I do, here you go...
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