Thinkfinity

Thinkfinity [|Thinkfinity.org], provided by Verizon, is a site that offers free educational lesson plans, tools for literacy enhancement and resources for teachers. The website also offers resources for students, parents and other potential individuals in education. The content is reviewed by national organizations and is assuredly valid. Check it out today!  I recently reviewed a few lesson plans on the website to enhance my own instruction. Since I basically teach Spanish grammar, it is difficult to find lesson plans on these topics. Yet, I found some lessons that would enhance a few topics that I teach. This lesson guides the teacher and students through the art of several different latin dances. My hope in including this lesson in my unit would be that the students could focus on a culturally important dance while effectively hearing and potentially using the verb Bailar. This would show them the importance of using AR verbs before they were held responsible for conjugating them formally.

In finding information in the target language, students will see the importance of language learning. As they go beyond simple grammar and vocabulary lessons, they will explore humor and other normal occurences in Spanish.

As I teach only Spanish I, grammar lessons are rather difficult to enhance. I have limited technology in my school. I can only get access to computers about once a week and presenting information on an LCP projector is equally as difficult. I was looking on thinkfinity for a lesson that was adapted to my needs. For instance, I can’t get computer access over two or more consecutive days. As I looked, I found that thinkfinity did not have very much to offer in teaching specific grammar topics. Yet, as I looked more deeply, I found that thinkfinity offered a different kind of lesson; that of finding value in the language. As many of my students are apathetic and do not value language learning, I decided to use lessons from thinkfinity that enabled students to appreciate Spanish. The lessons provided that students do some activities that would inadvertently allow them to realize that Spanish was fun and worthwhile. In the future, I hope to elaborate on this topic of correcting student apathy by providing meaningful activities to ensure that students appreciate the language. As we all know, if we are not interesting in the topic, it can be quite difficult to learn it. There were other lessons related to the language that I would like to explore as well. I recall browsing an alphabet lesson and understanding the importance of it. If one can understand the alphabet, many other very important skills can come quicker; pronunciation, prefixes and vocabulary memorization.