Thursday, February 7, 2013

Verb Dice (Conjugating Verbs in Spanish)

Erasable Cool Cubes
I purchased some "Cool Cubes" this year and have been putting them to good use.  The students were really excited about them at first and I think the first time I used them we just wrote vocabulary words on them,  rolled them, then said the word in Spanish and English.  Needless to say, they became "NOT Cool Cubes" after that.  The next time we used them to conjugate verbs and they moved back up a notch on the coolness factor.  Anyway, we used them again today to practice the present progressive.  I like them because it gives students a variety of choices for subject pronoun, verb matches.  They like them, because, well, they are big foam dice!  You don't need cool cubes to do this activity, and in fact, until this year I have just been using two dice with a "key" on the board.  They use one die to tell them what they subject is and the other for the verb.  For example, 1): yo 2): tú, etc and then on the other die 1) comer 2) hablar etc.  They roll the dice and conjugate verbs and use them in sentences.  Roll a 1 and a 2 and say (or write) "Yo estoy hablando (en la clase de español)".  It's a fun alternative to a blah worksheet and the students seem to enjoy it.  If you would like to try it out in your class and don't have cool cubes or dice I've included everything you need to give it a try in your class.  Just click on the image and get what you need!  We used these today with the present progressive tense, but you can use them for any tense!  You might try laminating them and using a hot glue gun to glue them together (at least, that's what I would do!)  I also included a blank cube so you can write whatever you want!  Again, I would laminate first, then you can write, erase, reuse! Your own cool cubes! How cool!



Friday, February 1, 2013

Tener and Tener que

My Spanish 1 students are learning to use the verb "tener" and "tener que" in the present tense.  Every year I see sentences like "Tengo que la clase de arte." and my ears hurt inside my head. :)  To try and combat this very common error, I helped students write sentences using both tener and tener que and then had them draw and color pictures of their sentences.  It seemed to be helpful, I didn't see any "I have to art class." sentences.  If you'd like a copy of the template I used, click on the image below!

Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Spanish Reflexive Verbs

We are learning about reflexive verbs in Spanish.  This can be a somewhat odd concept for English speakers as we do not necessarily have reflexive verbs in English.  We have been doing several practice activities and I want to try and help students write sentences that have all of the pieces they need.  We worked through a fun sentence unscramble activity and then did some drawing and independent sentence writing.  I think they're beginning to grasp the concept! I'm including the sentence drawing activity we did here, click HERE to get a copy.  If you'd like to check out the sentence unscramble activity we did, click on the image for more details!


Reflexive Verbs Sentence Writing Station Activities



Friday, January 18, 2013

Factoring the GCF in Polynomials

AHHH, polynomials!  You've got to love 'em.  We've been working our way through parabolas and quadratics in my Algebra 2 class and in preparation for solving quadratics we are learning how to factor.  Of course, we started by factoring the GCF from polynomial expressions.  I created a few tic-tac-toe game boards for factoring the GCF to give the students a more fun way to practice and thought I'd share them with you all!  Click on the image to get the game boards!  Enjoy!