¡Próspero Año Nuevo a todos! I hope this year is great for you personally & profesionally. 2013 brought me a new class. I have been teaching Spanish IV since August and LOVE it! It's wonderful to see my Spanish III students grow, and each day make steps towards proficiency in Spanish. The only downside to the new prep is that most of my time since August has been devoted to finding interesting resources, and then creating material for those resources to use in class, and sadly this blog has been neglected because of my workload. I hope to start sharing what I have done as the year progresses.
My Spanish IV students ended the semester with a movie called Los colores de la montaña. I spoke a little bit about it here, and I have to say it was sucessful beyond my wildest dreams. My students viewed most of the movie without subtitles, but we only saw about 7-8 minutes of the movie a day, and needed the rest of class time to talk about what we saw. (I plan on sharing the comprehension & discussion questions I wrote later on.) We had a couple of surprise snow days before break, and because of that we did see about 25 minutes of the movie with subtitles.
I usually show movie clips rather than an entire movie, but this one is worth the time. The actors are not profesional actors, and there is a lot of regional dialect, but my students found the story very engaging, and pushed themselves to understand what was being said. The movie is available on YouTube (without subtitles) if you are interested in seeing it.
You will also find a visual aide I created to introduce the main characters in the movie. Feel free to download and use if you show the movie in class. Be sure and let me know what you thought about it or how your students liked it if you show it in class.
