I just finished writing a beautiful post all about El Ratón Pérez, and was suddenly logged out without it saving. So now you get the short version. Ratón Pérez (aka Ratoncito Pérez) is the equivalent of the Tooth Fairy in the hispanic world and many other countries around the world. I think the tooth fairy really only comes to the United States. First graders have been learning all about him. So if your child asks you if they can leave their tooth for a mouse (ratón means mouse or rat), that is why. I had a student write to both the Tooth Fairy and Ratón Pérez and they both left her money under her pillow - two one dollar bills and two half dollars. I have told the students that he does not usually make trips to the U.S.... but you never know!
Reminder: if students would like to write a poem in Spanish for Poetry Slam, I am available after school on Mondays at Ashaway and Thursdays and Fridays at Hope Valley. Just email me to pick a date!
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¡Feliz día de la madre! Happy Mother's Day! Mrs. Mello's Second grade class and Mrs. Foggo's fourth grade class made Mother's Day flower poems this week. While most students wrote about their mom, some chose to write about other important women in their lives. I hope that they remember what they wrote so that they can read it to you ;-). Check out the photos of some of Mrs. Foggo's flowers. Poretry SlamThe Poetry Slam is on June 13th this year. If any students would like to read a Spanish poem, I would happily work with them after school on making a poem.
I am available on... Mondays at Ashaway 3:35-4:35 Thursdays and Fridays at Hope Valley 3:35-4:35 Email me at [email protected] if your child would like to work with me after school on a Spanish Poetry Slam poem! Happy cinco de mayo! Students spent some time this week learning what cinco de mayo actually is. I told them that if they went home and asked you, a lot of you would say that it is Mexican Independence Day.... am I right?? A LOT of adults think that cinco de mayo is Independence Day in Mexico, but they actually became an independent country 41 years prior to cinco de mayo. They became independent on September 16, 1821. La Batalla de Puebla occurred on May 5th 1862 when Mexico fought a battle against the French in the town of Puebla and won despite having a significantly smaller army than the French. Puebla still celebrates this victory as a holiday but it is not a big deal in the rest of Mexico. We, in the United States, make a big deal out of it by enjoying tacos, nachos, etc, but many of us don't even know what we're celebrating! Now you know! Many classes celebrated this week by talking about Mexican food, making sombreros (grade 2 at Ashaway, Mrs. Ricci at HV and Mrs. Lilly at HV), doing the Mexican Hat Dance (Mrs. Abbott) and creating decorations for Hope Valley's cinco de mayo fiesta tonight (Mrs Haberek, grade 2, and grade 3). I look forward to seeing how they look all hung up! For now, check out the pictures below of some of our activities and decorations!
What better way to finish out the week before vacation than with a little virtual reality! The Hope Valley PTO was generous enough to buy us one classroom set of virtual reality headsets and over 300 locations to explore. So we decided to take them for a test run and we had a blast! During fourth grade integrated Spanish with Mrs. Foggo, we have been learning about volcanoes. Last week we read a Scholastic News article in Spanish about Colima Volcano in Mexico and how it recently erupted. You can click here to see the video that we watched of the volcano erupting. Colima Volcano has been very active in the past few years and the eruption in the video was from January 19th. Today we took a Virtual Reality tour of Volcanoes all throughout the Ring of Fire. While we did not see Colima, one volcano we did see was Popocatepetl in Mexico. Other areas with high volcanic activity are Hawaii and Japan. We learned that the word volcano comes from the Greek God Vulcan who was the God of fire. The Spanish word for volcano - Volcan - is even more closely related to the name Vulcan. Check out the pictures below of our fun experience with the headsets today! Have a great vacation!
I am so excited to finally share with you the video that is the culmination of the grade 3 project on weather. The students have worked so hard on this project since around December. In pairs, they researched the weather and climate in a Spanish-speaking country and used that knowledge to create a fake weather forecast for an assigned date. They drew the forecast and researched a picture of a place in their country, both of which show up behind them in their clip. Then they presented their forecast aloud to the whole class and on video. Over half of the students completely memorized their lines... meaning no cue cards! I am proud of their work and excited that I was able to learn how to use the green screen, transitions, backgrounds, and audio in imovie to make the finished product look great! I look forward to showing the students in class this week. Take a look at the video below (it is 10 minutes, so make sure you have some time!). With every third grader participating, we touched upon weather in all 21 of the Spanish-speaking countries. I hope to do the project with Ashaway next year as well. Enjoy! Mrs. Abbott's students in kindergarten all made Chatterpix videos to go along with their Picasso pictures. Unfortunately, there was an issue with the app on the ipad that I used and the videos can't be shared to anywhere else. They are stuck on the ipad! So I recorded two of the videos from my phone as I watched them and shared them to my google account. I wish I could have done them all, but that would fill way too much space on my phone, and I'm lacking in space already! Here are the links to the videos...
Elyse Aditya Have a good weekend! Kindergarten and grade 1 have been working on their Spanish vocabulary as we also learn about hispanic art. As I mentioned in my last post, Kindergarten used their knowledge of body part vocabulary to make faces in the style of cubism. Mrs Abbott's class also made videos to go along with their pictures, but they are currently stuck in the abyss of one particular ipad that I can't figure out how to share it from! However, here is a picture of the bulletin board at Hope Valley with the Picasso faces.
Mrs, Haberek's first grade class learned about how Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist (married to another great artist, Diego Rivera) who was known for her self portraits and unfortunate unibrow. They then drew portraits of Frida Kahlo with different facial expressions based on feelings that they have learned. They are ADORABLE! Thanks to her unibrow, most pictures look a little angry, but that just adds to the funniness of it. Check out the pictures below. La Persistencia de la MemoriaGrade 2 students started learning to tell time in Spanish in December. In doing so, we talked about the painting "La Persistencia de la Memoria" - The Persistence of Memory - by Salvador Dalí. One of the elements this painting is known for is the melting clocks that are in it. We talked about how the clocks can mean that time is getting away from us or that time doesn't matter in dreams. There is another figure in the painting that is hard to decipher. Some students said they saw a dead horse, others saw a face, others saw a sheet draped over something. The truth is that there is no one right answer. The bland object in the painting can represent a lot of things. It can go along with the possible theme of dreaming in that you can't fully tell what it is, similar to objects or people in dreams. There are also ants and a fly in the painting which symbolize decay and death. This is such a well know painting that it has been replicated by The Simpsons, Spongebob, the Cookie Monster, and even Google!
Students at both schools created their own melting clocks in art class. I hope that next year we can do more with those clocks, but for this year a photo of the finished product will have to do. Below is a picture of the clocks hanging in Mrs. DiFranco's art room at Hope Valley. Below that is the original painting. I feel like I haven't posted an update in so long! Many classes are in the middle of different projects that I haven't been ready to display yet. Grade 3 at Hope Valley is working hard on their weather reports for the Spanish-speaking country that they have been assigned. Mrs. Zonfrilli's class is moving along really quickly. Mr. Fanning's class has had a few hiccups along the way, including snow days! I am really excited to complete this project. The students have done an amazing job researching their countries, writing their forecasts, and memorizing their lines. As each group presents their project, I am recording it and adding it to a video that will have all of the presentations for each Spanish-speaking country and each student. Check out the picture below of the editing process. In it, Austin and Shawn are shown in front of a hurricane, the weather that they chose for Nicaragua. Kindergarten at both schools recently made portraits that look like they are from Picasso's Cubism period in which people or objects appear to be broken up and put back together abstractly. Below is an example of a painting in the style of Cubism. Mrs. Abbott's class is now using an app called Chatterpix to make their picture look like it is talking while the student describes its face. The students are learning body parts in Spanish so this ties in with the curriculum while adding a bit of art and technology to the mix! I am hoping to be able to display the final product here soon. Fourth graders at Hope Valley and third graders at Ashaway have been writing pen pal letters back and forth to each other. They were very excited when we first exchanged letters! I have also been in contact with a teacher in Spain and the fourth graders sent their letters to her class as well. We are not-so-patiently awaiting their response! First graders just finished their unit on shapes and are moving on to family. They are also learning about families with their classroom teachers (and shapes, too, actually!). We read a story in English called "Families are Different" about a Chinese girl who is adopted and feels different until she realized that every family is different. I will be teaching the typical family words like mom, dad, brother, sister, grandma, grandpa, dog, and cat in Spanish. But some students may want different words like stepmom, stepdad, great grandma, nephew, fish, etc. I will teach them whichever words they need. However, I do draw the line on pets at some point... that always tends to get out of hand! They also know that they can talk about their own family, like how many brothers they have, but they don't have to. Second, third, and fourth grade are currently learning about professions. Keep in mind that this is actually the second grade curriculum, but since this is only the third year of the program, it will be another 2 years before we teach the actual grade 4 curriculum. This year's second graders will be the first class to have started the program in kindergarten and will go potentially to grade 12! In learning about professions, the students are also learning how to be polite in Spanish-speaking countries. The words tú and usted both mean "you" but tú is only used with peers, friends, people your age, and some family members. Usted is used with adults, people you just met, and people with jobs that require respect such as police officer, doctor, teacher, etc. Depending on the country, usted is also used to show respect toward elders, including parents and grandparents. In Spain, tú is used more frequently than some other countries. I hope you all enjoyed your snow days! Remember that students can always check out the Spanish website here for games and activities to practice their Spanish when we are not in school! Mrs. Bliven's class at Ashaway FINALLY recorded videos for the conversation that we have been working on. We have been working hard to get the green screen technology to be able to make videos where the students (or, in this case, puppets) appear to be somewhere else. In the 4 videos that we made, the students chose puppets among Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí. Using a green screen, I superimposed them into The Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, the Alhambra in Granada, and Park Güell in Barcleona (all in Spain). Check out the videos that we made using the links below.
Diego Rivera and Picasso at The Alhambra in Granada Diego Rivera and Salvador Dalí at The Plaza Mayor in Madrid Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí at The Plaza Mayor in Salamanca Frida Kahlo and Pablo Picasso at Park Güell in Barcelona Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo were married to each other in real life yet somehow those were the only two puppets that the students did not choose to be in a video together. Go figure! I have more pictures and videos coming soon as first grade is finishing up their shape artwork and kindergarten is finishing their Cubism Picasso faces. Have a good weekend! |
La Autora¡Hola! My name is Dori Carpenter. I teach K-4 Spanish at Hope Valley and Ashaway Elementary Schools in the Chariho Regional School District. I began teaching high school Spanish in 2010 and have been teaching at the elementary level in Chariho since 2014. I studied Spanish and Secondary Education at Providence College and The University of Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain. Archives
November 2017
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