Celebrating Hispanic Heritage - All Year Long

Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month is super close to my heart! In my opinion, we should be teaching our students about influential Hispanics all year long. Can you tell I love my culture and heritage? Today, I am sharing a few things and ideas that can help you celebrate Hispanic Heritage all year long! Don't forget to sign up to receive my email newsletter and download a FREE Prefixes unit just for joining! 

Lotería

Lotería is a popular game played in Hispanic households. Have you ever played? It is a type of bingo with pictures and words that have become iconic over the years. Ask any Hispanic family about lotería, they probably know about it, own a set, and probably even have a t-shirt about it!!! Some of the pictures on the traditional lotería are not appropriate for the classroom. So imagine my excitement when I found a kid friendly version on Amazon. This Lil' Loteria is perfect for classroom use (pictures and words are kid friendly) PLUS it is bilingual. Such a great tool to build vocabulary in Spanish and English while having fun! You can see it on Amazon here with my affiliate link. 

Activities

You can use a variety of activities to teach or have students learn about influential Hispanics. I have created a bundle of activities that you can use all throughout the year and still be purposeful when teaching about these amazing Hispanic Leaders. 

• Hispanic Leaders Book and Activities with matching game cards and worksheets
• Hispanic Leaders Research Slides: Students can research, learn and complete.
• Hispanic Leaders Fact/Opinion: You can use these any time you are teaching a unit on fact/opinion
• Hispanic Leaders Fix the Sentences: You can use these in a grammar/writing center.

Click on any of the titles above to see this resources or click HERE to see the bundle. 

Videos

There are a few videos I've used to introduce and review Hispanic Heritage. Click below to be taken to the videos on YouTube. There are so many more amazing videos, these are just a few of my favorites. 

Hispanic Heritage Month

Hispanic Heritage Month | Disney Channel

Hispanic Heritage Month | Nick Jr.

Sesame Street Latino Festival

FREEBIE

Thank you for reading this far! I hope you and your students have a great time celebrating influential Hispanic Leaders all year long. Click HERE to download FREE bookmarks featuring 8 different influential Hispanics.  These FREE bookmarks are exclusive to my blog readers. This means they are not available any where else! Enjoy!

Don't forget to visit my TpT store HERE to see more activities for your bilingual classroom. Until next time friends! ¡Hasta luego!

*This post contains an Amazon Affiliate link. This means I make a small commission at NO EXTRA CHARGE to you when you purchase through my links. Thank you for your support, come back soon!

Linguacious Review and a Giveaway!

Hello everyone! I am back today with a fabulous resource you can use with your bilingual students or even your own kiddos. Have you heard of Linguacious? Linguacious is a company that provides language learning products in Hebrew, Spanish, French, German, Mandarin Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, English/ESL, Russian. I have been trying out a few of their products and am here with an in depth review AND a giveaway. 

Linguacious focuses on both the expressive and receptive language domains and their materials target all language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Keep reading to see how I've used them.

~Flashcards~

We all use flashcards with our students, well, wait until you try these! The Linguacious flashcards have:

1) vibrant, real life photos

2) easy to read text

3) a QR code that you can scan to listen to the correct pronunciation from a native speaker

The flashcards include suggested games you can try at home or at school. It is a great way to practice and truly internalize a new language. I have used them with my 2nd graders in a word study center where they scan the QR code, listen to the word, then they'll try to use it in a sentence. I've also used these with my 18 month old baby girl. Of course, she's not speaking in sentences, yet! With her, I'll point to the picture, say the word, then scan it with the phone QR reader (she LOVES to listen to the word pronunciation).

~Posters~

The posters are a quick way to have the same words as the flashcards. I have these displayed around the classroom and they are easy to scan whenever you want students to practice their words. There are 3 posters which include: a side of things around the home and a side of animals. 

Giveaway & Coupon Code

Linguacious and I have teamed up to bring you a 10% discount using MMBILI10 on your Amazon purchase. Take advantage before it expires on February 12th! Furthermore, we will be giving away a poster set to one lucky follower. All you have to do is follow the rafflecopter instructions below. Good luck and until next time, friends!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Scholastic - Let's Find Out Review

Welcome back to my blog friends! Today I am here to share about a fantastic resource you can utilize in your Spanish Immersion/Dual Language classroom. I was recently contacted by Scholastic to review their Let’s Find Out Bilingual Magazine. Imagine my excitement!!!

I have been trying these out with my kiddos for about three weeks and wanted to share with you this wonderful, highly engaging magazine and some of its components.

Magazine

First, I received magazines for each of the students in my classroom. I have been utilizing these in small group. I love the crisp photographs and easy to read format that my students can easily follow. There is an individual magazine for students and a BIG teacher edition. I love posting this BIG version on my wall to engage interest even before reading. The magazines are great for Pre-K – 1^st grade students. You can even use them like me – with my struggling 2^nd graders. The content aligns with the standards as shown below. 

Online Components

Let’s Find Out in Spanish is simple and effective to implement in the classroom. It has an online component which not only reads the magazine out loud to the students, it also includes a building background video, learning games, and even links to related printables. Students are making connections and recalling content with these high interest activities. 

Vocabulary

Building language and vocabulary is always of high importance in the classroom. Just look below at all the vocabulary students read and studied throughout this past year’s issues! My students immediately started adding words they were learning to their Libro de Palabras.

Printables

Last, but certainly not least, the printables are SO helpful and easy to access. There’s prediction charts, observation recording pages, following directions, patterns to cut/paste, and so much more. The reading is engaging and it is followed by an activity that is just as engaging for the students.

You can subscribe here and start planning for next year :) 

So now, time for a GIVEAWAY! Scholastic has allowed me to choose 1 of my blog readers to win a free class set of the May/June issue (limit of 30 magazines). If chosen, you must provide your full name and address to receive these.  All you have to do to enter is leave a comment with your name and how you would utilize these magazines. Winner will be chosen on May 5, 2017 and contacted by May 6, 2017.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this post and found helpful ideas for your classroom. Until next time!

Exit Tickets in the Bilingual Classroom

Welcome back to my blog friends! Today I am sharing ideas on how to use Exit Tickets in the bilingual classroom.

Exit tickets are a way great to assess your students quickly and effectively. I do not use these every day, but I do try to incorporate them at least two to three times per week. On other days, I utilize Plickers for an easy way to check for understanding and collect data. (Blog post to come soon).

So how do I use these and what are the benefits? Keep reading to find out and grab a FREEBIE.

~Participation

During whole group teaching, I always have the same students that are participating and showing their understanding, while the rest of the class is quiet. With exit tickets, all student are accountable to be paying attention. I do tell them "Class, there will be an exit ticket after this so make sure to focus and pay close attention." This promotes 100% engagement. 

~Reflection

Through this exit ticket students can self reflect. I'll have students that cannot answer come up to me and tell me, they didn't understand or know what to write. I can do a quick reteach and it's wonderful to see their faces when the lesson clicks and they suddenly "get it," Also, I love seeing those that can answer accurately right away and their comments such as a confident: "I know this!"

~Writing

Writing about content is such an important skill for my students. Exit tickets help me evaluate their writing and they get extra practice in writing about what they've learned. This is the perfect time to spiral in proper capitalization and punctuation in a quick way. 

~Assessment/Reteach

Students post these up on my wall and I am able to gauge almost instantly who needs extra help. During small groups, I am able to group based on their needs and reteach the skills necessary to master the concept. 

Here are a few pictures of exit tickets in action and how I display them in my classroom. I team teach so I have two anchor chart sheets posted by my door. These charts have squares with numbers on them. Students in my class are assigned a number at the beginning of the year and that's where they will place their exit tickets throughout the year. 

Here is a freebie you can use right now with your students.

My Spanish pack of exit tickets is available at my TpT store! These are perfect to use with any content and promote self reflection after a lesson.

Have you used exit tickets in your classroom? Let me know how they've worked for you! Until next time friends!