Como Una Cabra 1

When you translate ‘Estar como una cabra‘ directly it means, ‘to be like a goat’ which sounds pretty weird – but thats the point! In Spanish it is said when someone or something is a little strange, bizarre or out of the ordinary. Mostly this term is used in a funny way, if someone is acting crazy or extra silly that day – ‘esta noche estás como una cabra.” (tonight you are a little crazy!)

Your friendly neighbourhood travel guide,

-Citylife Madrid

I love idioms, so when I decided to start a Spanish Language Learning comic strip I looked for a good one to use as a title. Como Una Cabra seemed to fit the bill.

Before I introduce the comic though, I want to give a major shout out to the people at Plasq, who have created the amazing Comic Life software. It is spectacularly good.

I'm using the 30 day free trial download at the moment, but there is no doubt in my mind at all that I'll be shelling out the $30 dollars to keep using it. Yep, $30! That's all, and when you see what I (a non-designer, non-comic artist, non-genius) have done with it, you'll see how great that price is. Better still, this is  their response to a question about commercial use:

Hello there!
Yes, most definitely! Anything you create using Comic Life, you retain ownership (as long as the source images are yours/licensed) and can use and sell for commercial production.
...
Thanks Very Much!

There are a few comic strip creators online, but many of them have carefully defined limits on what you can do with them. Not so with Comic Life. Hurrah!

Anyway, with that enthusiastic plug out of the way...

May I introduce Como Una Cabra, Issue 1!

The theory is that over the next couple of years I'll be covering most, if not all, of the topics and themes covered in first, second and third year of Spanish learning. I'm aiming to use no English in the comic, so that language is encountered in an approximation of real life, with visual context to give meaning.

We'll see how that goes.

Comments welcome below, and if you have a go at using Comic Life I would also LOVE to see what you come up with!

Emoji Literacy

Yesterday I became aware of this shocking statistic:

"ROUGHLY 40 PERCENT OF AMERICANS DON’T KNOW HOW TO READ 
OR WRITE EMOJI (/e’moje/). THAT’S NEARLY 120 MILLION PEOPLE. 
IT’S A SAD REALITY, BUT IT’S ONE DOMINO’S IS HOPING TO CHANGE."

Domino's Pizza has launched a whole campaign on the subject of Emoji Literacy, including Flashcards!

Now the Flashcards, as amusing as they were, are all gone already. But you can still print your own on the emoji literacy website.

But the whole thing got me thinking about how familiar and comfortable emoji are for my students. SO...

Here is my own first edition of Spanish Emoji Flashcards. 

Free to download, print* (laminate if you like) and share! They're just the smiley faces and emotions/ reactions for now, but I may do another set with other things sometime. Or you can, and share in the comments 

* To get the words on the back of the right pictures you'll need to print two sided, turning on the short side of the page. I hope that makes sense cos I really can't work out a better way to explain it!

Using Tarsia Puzzles

Tarsia puzzles rock.

And you think you haven't heard of them, because you haven't heard the word Tarsia before, but you'll totally recognise them the minute you see one! (I think I had a Care Bears one when I was small.)

Here's one:

These things are great for learning vocabulary, and they can be made using English and the Target Language, or English and pictures. Personally, I prefer pictures, as it takes half the reading out of the exercise and levels they playing field a bit for students with specific learning difficulties. It's also a closer experience to the way we use our first language.

There are two ways you can use Tarsia puzzles in the classroom. 

1. Give out blank templates and topics. Each student makes a tarsia puzzle using their template, and vocabulary from their designated topic. You should stress the importance of filling in all the puzzle pieces BEFORE cutting the triangles up. (otherwise nothing will match and it will be impossible!) Once everyone has made a puzzle you have a whole bunch of revision puzzles for the class to challenge each other with.

2. Make puzzles using this fantastic free software

The program allows you to create puzzles in any of these shapes:

and there are other features of this software, which I'll look at another time, that are also really great for the MFL classroom too.

It's designed for maths teachers so I haven't found a way, so far, to use pictures instead of words within the Tarsia Maker software, but it can be done with a little fiddling around and converting to PDF

Here's the Los Colores Tarsia Puzzle from the picture above, but in a printable format, so that your triangles are nice and big. I'm going to recommend printing on light card or laminating (you know how I feel about laminating!)

If you make any good tarsia puzzles that you'd like to share, that would be awesome. Pop a comment below, with a link to Drive or Dropbox!

5 Great Blog Posts I Read This Week.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/garrettheath/

I completely love Twitter, and I use it to stay in touch with current theory and ideas in Modern Foreign Language and English Teaching.

You can follow me  if you like...

Follow @yellospraypaint

...I retweet the stuff that I find personally useful, interesting or amusing, and I put my own blog posts there too.

This week my top five blog posts (in no particular order) were the following:

1. This post from Edutopia is about 7 Apps for Student Creators, is chockablock full of great ideas for using technology in the classroom. Adobe Voice, in particular, seems ideal for taking the stress and "on the spot" anxiety feelins out of oral work in the MFL classroom.

2. LitandTech  had a great post this week on How I used Socrative for Writing Instruction. 

I see their efforts flow onto my screen as soon as they submit them. I can tell right away which students are "getting it" and who needs more help. It's low stakes because they know I'm not grading these, we are just experimenting with a new skill.

3. FrenchTeacherNet had a great post on An approach to translation which keeps emphasis on target language, with examples in French that could easily be created in other target languages.

4. TeacherToolKit (which is rapidly becoming one of my faves) wrote about Twitter for the Classroom with a really simple and easy to follow step by step guide that anyone could follow

And Finally,

5. Transparent Language write a flipping excellent post with loads of vocabulary on the topic of Giving Advice in Spanish.
Seriously, this one made my day :)

Numbers: The Easiest 10 Marks in the Spanish Junior Cert Exam.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jamescridland/

I'll say it again...

The EASIEST 10 marks in the Spanish Junior Cert Exam.

The first section of Part III, the written part of the Spanish Junior Certificate exam, is worth ten marks. There are five questions. They are always numbers. 

You are given a number (written in numerals) and asked to write it out in words. 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/andymag/

In the last fifteen years there have only been questions in the following categories:

• Dates
• Times
• Years
• Quantities
• Ordinal numbers

So, it doesn't take much study time to have those covered, and feel confident about it. Those ten marks could be the difference between grades!

And as if that wasn't easy enough, you can have a list of all the exam questions since 2001.

Here it is compiled by year, and here it is by category.

Yep. 
No excuses left! 

Vamos de Compras!

Warning: This exercise will NOT be suitable for a boys school. Contains underwear.

This website is amazing awesome.

Like, I would think it was the coolest even if I wasn't trying to think of ways to make learning fun and interactive.

Seriously, check it out! There are paper doll print-outs to die for, from different eras, in different styles, in colour and in black and white to be coloured in. They gave me a fantastic idea for teaching clothing and revising colours and numbers and, as I was completing my teaching practice in a girls school at the time, I was psyched.

I mean, come on! How beautiful is this?!

Then I did a whole bunch of things wrong. I spent forever printing pages, cutting out clothes, laminating them, cutting out the laminated clothes, working out whether a dress looked like it might be silk, and writing “seda” on the back, writing “lana” on the back of others. I spent ages trying to make sure I had a good cross section of colours and items of clothing too. It took ages (and of course my inspector didn’t show for that class anyway, aint it always the way)

Ask my sister, I had her cutting out too!

Don’t do any of that. There’s no point. Sure, you have materials you can use forever, but I think your class will get so much more out of it if they do it this way instead:

1.   Teach clothes, colours, fabrics, and the questions and answers associated with shopping.

2.   Print off a whole bunch of paper doll papers from PaperthinPersonas. My personal favourites, and the ones I used, are from Marisole Monday and Friends. You can print them in colour if you want to speed things along, or in black and white if you think the class will benefit from colouring them in, or if you’re dealing with a black-and-white-only printing scenario.

3.   Give each girl one or two pages to colour and cut out carefully.

4.   Put the girls in groups of three or four and have each group “open a shop”. They get an A3 page to display their clothes, and can write the name of the shop across the top. They lay out all the clothes in their shop, write prices next to them, and they can decide things like whether they are made of cotton or leather.*

5.   Each girl still has a paper doll which she has cut out. She glues this to an A4 or copybook page, names her and writes three likes and three dislikes beside her doll.

6.   Now the class is split in two. Half the girls “go shopping” and half the girls open the shops. Each shopper is given a budget (you can useplaying cards as currency if you like).

7.   The rules are:

·        You have to buy at least one thing from your likes

·        You can’t buy anything from your dislikes

·        You can only buy something after you ask the price in Spanish

·        You can only buy something you can afford

·        Your doll must be fully dressed at the end.

8.   The shop that makes the most money is the winner.

9.   Each girl glues the new clothes onto her doll for homework, and writes a paragraph about what she is wearing.

* they could also create a little box/space in the "shop" and label it Probadores if they felt super creative.

10 Things You Can Do in the Language Classroom with Playing Cards

https://www.flickr.com/photos/gviciano/

Regular playing cards are really not expensive, and can be used to make the classroom interactive in a whole lot of ways. Of course, if you're happy to spend a bit more, there are also Spanish playing cards which add a touch of authentic Spanish culture to whatever you're doing. I love using these and getting the chance to talk about difference and diversity.

I also love giant playing cards as they're so much easier to see from the back of the classroom, and they have a certain novelty value that I enjoy!

Now, the above posts will bring you to what I think are your best options on amazon, but obviously playing cards are readily available everywhere, and it's worth noting that I first saw giant playing cards in Tiger for half nothing.

Anyway, onward!

Ten things you can do with playing cards in the language classroom

1. Create your seating plan
There are a couple of ways you can do this. For a totally random seating plan take enough cards from one deck to place one on each table, and take the same cards from a second deck.
Shuffle the cards from the second deck and have students pick a card as they enter the room. Each student goes to find their match, and sits down.
Personally, I prefer a less random approach most of the time. For less random seat assignment I would place cards on desks before students enter the room, but assign cards to students.

2. Make dividing up for group work easy!
At the start of the year give each student a playing card, and a square of sticky-backed-plastic. Have them stick the card onto their copy book, or homework journal, or wherever they'll be able to readily refer to it throughout the year.
Make sure you have al the Aces, all the 1s, 2s,3s etc, as far up as your class goes. That way you can divide easily into a variety of group sizes:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/pbekesi/

e.g. 28 in the class. All cards from Aces to 7s assigned.

Pairs: Matching number AND colour
Groups of four: Matching numbers
Groups of seven: Matching suit
Two teams: Reds v blacks

and once you've done that you can 

3. Randomly select a student...
...by asking one of them to pick a card from your deck!
I like to have a pack of cards in an envelope for each class, so that only the right cards are in there.

4. Create a classroom marketplace...
Busyteacher has a post about something like this (and the next three entries too). Here's my version:

Use playing cards as an easy substitute for cash. All students are in pairs, half of them are vendors and half of them are shoppers.
All the shoppers get the same amount of cash, and a shopping list which will take them to each of the "shops" in turn. Each "shop" gets "products" to sell, with prices on them (so that no-one goes nuts for profit and makes it all impossible!). My "products" are laminated pictures of items (and my shopping lists are laminated too. I just love my laminating machine!) So, for example, my "Frutería" has several apples, oranges, a punnet of strawberries, bananas, a pineapplle, and so on.

Pairs have to buy everything on their list, greeting each vendor and asking questions like "Do you have...?", "How much is it?" and so on, and vendors reply. The end of the interaction is thanks and goodbyes. And for the second half of the exercise vendors and shoppers can swap.

5. Practice prepositions:
Lay out a four by five grid of playing cards on a desk, and then lay out a second layer on top, allowing the bottom cards to show at one side. 
Now you can ask "where is the five of hearts", and students can use their prepositions of answer "under the six of spades" or "to the right of the Ace of diamonds" or whatever.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nayukim/

6. Play "¡Pesca!"
Great for practising real basics like "do you have" and "I have" or "I don't have", and numbers.
The rules are here.
(Incidentally, the vocab in the game is very simple, but it does include the use of an imperative verb!)

7. Give me... 10!
This is a nice simple one for vocab revision.
I write a topic on the board like "Healthy foods" or "things I would pack to go on holiday", and then ask a student to pick a card. If the card is an 8, then each group has to come up with 8 things from that category, and write them down. The first group with an acceptable list of eight, gets the card.

8. Play "Play your cards right"
Instructions here.
Practice whatever questions and answers you've just been studying, and also "arriba" and "abajo".

This is best as a team game, and with giant playing cards.

9. Card Talkers
Debbie's Spanish Learning has this great game, where a card drawn at random from a pack, corresponds to a grid which tells you what question you have to answer.

She has a basic grid, with questions like "How old are you?" and "What time is it?" and an advanced grid with more difficult questions, including describing things.

It's pretty awesome!

10. Rewards
Finally, I've heard to teachers giving Spanish Class Pesos as rewards for particularly good work or behaviour, and playing cards are as good as anything to use as tokens.

Have a Tienda de Recompensas where students can spend their pesos

As ever, I don't know all the things...
...if you have another thought, please do pop it in the comments. I'd love to hear what you're doing with playing cards!

10 Things You Can Do with Dice in the Language Classroom!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tomitapio/

1. Make dice!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dicemanic/

With a printable template*, printed on light card, some pencils or markers and some scissors, you can have a whole class make their own dice. They can make regular dice with the numbers 1-6 written in words (uno, dos, tres etc), or dice with words or pictures drawn for six items of vocabulary they've just learned (colours, pets, clothes, whatever!).

* the templates in this link have dots on them for numbers, but you can just tipex them before photocopying. I linked this site because it has six, ten and 12 sided templates and they're free.

Whatever the subject, once the dice are made you can use them for all sorts of things. 

Use dice with words:

2. I have a colour die and a clothing die. I roll both dice and get "azul" and "camiseta". The first person in my small group to say "a blue t-shirt" wins a point. 

3. OR The first person in my small group to say "Una camiseta azul" wins a point. 

4. Or, I'm working on drawing and I draw and label a blue t-shirt, before rolling again to see what else is in the "outfit" I'm making.

5. Or, I have a die for nouns, one for verbs, and one for adjectives, and I can play mad-libs!

Use picture dice:

6. Do a quick-fire vocab quiz with dice that don't have any words on them. 

( you can also do numbers 2-4 above with picture only dice, but it's a little harder!)

Practice your numbers!

Not every die in the world has six sides! Here is a link to a "Pound of Dice" listing on Amazon, a fantastic online dice shop based in the UK (and here's another one set up especially for teachers), where you can get dice in a whole bunch of varieties. (impress the nerd in your class by knowing that a six sided die is called a d6, and a 20 sided die is a d20, and so on!)

Anyway, if you get a small selection of dice you could...

7. Roll two or more dice and write down the numbers in words in the form of a maths equation. (For bonus points you could have another die with +,-, x,/, on the sides, to tell you what the equation should be!)

so I roll a d20, a d6 and a d4, and I get 12, 5 and 1. 

I write down: Doce + Cinco - Uno = Dieciseis

How d'you like that cross-curricular numeracy! 

8. Play countdown

Not SO much a language classroom game, this one, but still great for practising bigger numbers.

I write roll three dice for a target number and write doscientos treinta y seis on the board

I roll five more dice and write up "Dos, Ocho, Once, Seis, Cuatro" and start a two minute timer.

A student writes: 

(seis + cuatro) x once = 110

ciento diez + ocho = ciento dieciocho

ciento dieciocho x dos = doscientos treinta y seis

they, or the person nearest the target number, wins.

9. Have a student roll dice to pick a random student to answer a question, or start the presentations - It doesn't always have to go alphabetically!

10. Practice your grammar

https://www.flickr.com/photos/
artbystevejohnson/

Print 3 numbered sheets with six tenses, six persons, and six verbs, and have students roll three times to make a sentence.

So first I roll a 2 and that's "future", then I get 3: he or she, and then I roll a 5: "hablar"

My sentence might be "mi profesora hablará el español en el examen, la semana que viene."

I love this because it goes some way towards making the language you're going to need and use unpredictable, which is more like real life!

And a bonus one:

11. Combine a couple of the above ideas and have a totally spontaneous dialogue:

One student rolls a colour die and a noun die, and asks the shop assistant how much the (I guess we'll stick with) a blue tshirt costs.

The second student rolls two dice and adds or multiplies the numbers to get a price.

The first student can buy it or not, and they say goodbye.

If you have more ideas...

Please mail them to me on a stamped addressed dustbin lid, or alternatively, pop them in the comments. 

Links to sites I like to use

There are loads of amazing tools online that allow me to make resources, worksheets and exercises in a tenth of the time it would take to do it on my own. 

There are also some fantastic blogs, websites and resources that I often check out and learn from.

I'll keep this page updated with my favourites, and if you know of any that should be here please let me know in the comments!

Wordle - great for making word clouds, totally free, and super easy to use.
Wordsearch Maker - free, easy to use, very simple software (I think even a very old computer could handle it!)
Quizlet - awesome site to practice vocabulary. You need a free account, but then you can make any number of sets of "Flash cards" with pictures, and play games to learn. 
SpanishDict - really reliable and has audio for pronunciation too. 
Pancomido - another teacher's blog that explains things really well and had a lot of great links
Crossword Maker - free, easy to use, very simple software (I think even a very old computer could handle it!)
TES.co.uk - you need an account but it's free. Can be a bit of a mixed bag, but when you sort through the rubbish there are some great resources. 

Exercises, printables and resources.

There are going to be a lot of resources, free printable worksheets, and puzzles and exercises on YellowSprayPaint, and they're gong to be scattered around the place depending on what they're about.

However, you'll also be able to find them all here.

Please feel free to use any of these resources, and if you're a teacher you can photocopy them to your heart's content, just please leave the copyright notice and attribution at the bottom in the footer.*

Infinitive Verbsearch 1

Infinitive Verbsearch 2

Infinitive AR ER or IR worksheet

Spot the Verb (Infinitives Only) Wordle
Infinitives Crossverb

* Obviously don't sell any of my work, that would be very bad form.

The Infinitive and Conjugating Verbs

The infinitive is what we call a verb in it's simplest form. If you look up a verb in the dictionary you look up the infinitive form of that verb.

The infinitive has two parts - The stem and the ending.
In Spanish the endings of verbs are always either -ar, -er, or -ir.

So, for example, if you see the word Hablar, you can see that it ends with an -ar, so it's a verb.

Lets look it up.


Hablar means "to speak".

(you can see in this picture that there's much more information in the dictionary too. I'm going to write a post on how to use the dictionary soon, so that you can find the right information when you look up words. If it sounds silly to learn how to use a dictionary then just go and look up the word "face" in a Spanish/English dictionary, and come back and tell me which of those words you think you'll use!)


The Stem is habl and the ending is ar

The infinitive form of a verb, like hablar, is a little bit like a form where only one part has been filled in

Conjugating a verb is like adding the rest of the information to the form.

One conjugation of hablar is hablamos:

You can see that the stem stayed the same (habl) but the ending changed from -ar to -amos, and you can also see that now the whole form is filled out! That little ending, -amos, packs a punch. It tells us who is doing the verb, and when it is happening. Hablamos means: "We speak". 

Hablamos el Español. 

Hablamos el Ingles.

We're not going to look at all the endings right here. In the next post I'm going to cover Regular Verbs, like hablar, and the endings we put on them in the present tense. 

So, to recap, those are two main reasons to know your infinitives:

1. You need to know the infinitive of a verb if you want to look it up in the dictionary. 
2. You need to know the infinitive of a verb if you're going to conjugate it (and talk about how you used to swim every day, or say you will do you're homework later). 

And there are also some times when you can use the infinitive without conjugating it, usually with a verb that is conjugated.

For example:    


Quiero hablar contigo.
I want "to speak" with you

Quiero is conjugated and means "I want", so you don't need to conjugate hablar because we already have information about who and when.





Here are some puzzles and exercises to help you remember all of that!

Spot the verb
Verbsearch 1 Verbsearch 2
Separate the verbs into -ar, -er, and -ir verbs
Spot the infinitive
Crossverb


Coming soon:
Find the Stem
Verb information forms