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Visual orthography: la coma


Learn when to write a "coma" 
Remember: Smiling has a lot of benefits.
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Stop and think: Paulo Freire, a Thinker

It is important to nurture our students minds with thoughts, but deep thoughts to make them think about crucial problems and reflect on them.
Paulo Freire can be a great example to introduce the concept of Thinker from the IB Learner Profile.

A Thinker is a person who use critical and creative thinking skilss to analyze and take responsible action on complex problems & exercise initiative in making reasoned, ethical decisions. [From IBO]
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Learn Spanish online: Mi vida loca

Bored during summer vacation?
Don't know what to do with your life?
You want to improve on your Spanish level?
This article might help you answering all previous questions. 
Mi vida loca is an interactive TV show (or internet show to be more accurate) to learn Spanish independently. It's interesting from the point of view that the student will have to interact with the show saying phrases and sentences aloud (with the possibility of checking pronunciation) to make the show going, making the activity very close to Real Life Situations. 
One of the situations you will face in the first chapter: you are in a taxi and you have to give directions to the taxi driver, then you will have to choose among euro notes the exact and correct amount to pay your bill. 
Another interesting available tool is "The Learning section", which is a learning supplement with video explanations of vocabulary and grammar, plus extra activities.
You have also available a syllabus and multiple printouts divided by "Grammar notes" and "vocabulary lists" for each chapter and focusing in specific language functions. For instance, the first chapter will focus on learning these specific "language situations": dealing with simple social situations, saying yes, no & saying I don't understand.
You can also take a look beforehand to the transcript to anticipate the content, improving your understanding of dialogues.
Take ownership of your learning, become your own teacher. Take the risk and you'll see how much you learn. Take a look to the teachers' tips and practice a role play or make a comment on "culture" section, tell us something about tapas.
One thing to take into account is that this TV show is produced by BBC with the assistance from people from the north of Spain. Therefore, they speak Castilian Spanish. 

Remember! There is NO Standard Spanish, all Spanish are standards and all are great, there is no one better than other. Each one has their own characteristics and particularities. For example in Castilian Spanish [used just in northern and central Spain] they pronounce the c as the English th- sound, while other varieties [Andalusian, Canarian, American varieties] pronounce the c like the s. Rather than being reluctant to learn different accents, I encourage you to learn from them all. Look at their culture particularities and compare them with the variety you are learning and get to understand and accept the differences. 
Great questions your teacher should be happy to answer: 
Why do they pronounce the c as th- in English in Castilian Spanish?
Why do they use "vosotros" in Castilian Spanish?
Why are so many varieties of Spanish in the world?
A green tip:
Do not print out any resources, save the needed files in your computer and work with them from your computer instead. You can make a difference. Remember that we need 15 trees to make 1 ton of paper. Want to know more about benefits of trees? Click here. Spread the word!




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