Quick tips: using commas in Spanish

Hi there,
I am starting a series of quick and short posts about certain aspects that are usually difficult for people learning Spanish.
Easy and quick, a visual to review/learn one concept.
Today, I want to start this series with an orthography topic, commas.
Remember: Spanish and English are sometimes similar, but also different ;)

Lunaprofe 12/19/2014  No comment

IB Profile in Spanish: Communicator

Hi there!
Another poster to use in your class. The image grasps the concept of being a good communicator and the definition of the attribute is added.
This poster is perfect to hang on your class wall or just to use it as a quick prompt in your class.
In sources and links are a really interesting document if you are looking for activities to teach/learn the IB Profile for your IB course. And, remember, if you have new activities not listed in the document share with the community.
Have you made a poster about the IB Profile in your class and want to share it out? Contact us ;)

If you are looking for activities in Spanish to work along with IB posters check this post.


Do you want to know more?

Sources and links:

• IB Profile posts in antonioluna.org
• IBLP collaborative document
• IB Profile in Spanish

Education is simply the soul of a society

as it passes from one generation to another.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Lunaprofe 12/15/2014  No comment

IB Profile in Spanish: Reflective

Hi there!
Another poster to use in your class. The image is a very famous one about Bobby Fischer who perfectly reflects this attribute.
In sources and links are a really interesting document if you are looking for activities to teach/learn the IB Profile for your IB course. And, remember, if you have new activities not listed in the document share with the community.
Have you made a poster about the IB Profile in your class and want to share it out? Contact us ;)

If you are looking for activities in Spanish to work along with IB posters check this post.


Do you want to know more?

Sources and links:

• IB Profile posts in antonioluna.org
• IBLP collaborative document
• IB Profile in Spanish

Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little 

falls into lazy habits of thinking.

Albert Einstein

Lunaprofe 12/12/2014  No comment

Y10 IGCSE

Good morning!
My name is Antonio Luna and today I am going to be your Spanish teacher.

I hope you enjoy this lesson.
aThank you for your attention and do not hesitate to ask any questions or ask for any clarification during the lesson.

Lunaprofe 12/10/2014  No comment

"Pirates" tongue twisters: "RRRR"

Tongue twisters are really useful when learning a second language. They help you out with your pronunciation, you have fun while practicing them...
Tongue twisters are linguistic tools to improve on our pronunciation but at the same time are cultural snapshots from the target language as well. 
They are a tool for improving our sounds in the language we are studying and develop fluency. They work really well because the stress bar is set really low when practicing a tongue twister. 
In our minds they are link to our childhood when we were practicing tongue twisters in our Primary/Elementary School, at home with our parents or challenging our friends to see who could say it faster and correct.
Just because all these you should consider including tongue twisters in your language class.

A potential activity you can do with this visual resource is to have your students recording one of these three tongue twisters focused on "r" sound. Sometimes doing this a student realize how much progress he/she is making and is a good push for his/her motivation and/or can identify better what he/she needs to work on.

Some more possible activities you can do in class are:

• Start reading aloud a simple tongue twister slow. For instance: cuchara, cucharita, cucaracha.
• You can add words with similar sound to make it more difficult to say it.
• You can propose to your class to look for words that has a similar sound and make a class tongue twister.
• Practice tongue twisters speeding them up little by little. Try this one about tongue twisters:

El trabalenguas del trabalenguas

Si al pronunciar te trabas con las palabras,

practica con trabalenguas,

porque trabalenguando, trabalenguando,

te irás destrabalenguando.

Want to know more about tongue twisters? Check this post!

• Tongue Twisters: a funny resource to learn a language 

You can never be overdressed or overeducated

Oscar Wilde

Lunaprofe 12/08/2014  No comment

Noun gender in Spanish: Special rules [compilation]

We know that life is not that easy as we learn a rule and everything works just great. We know it's a little bit more difficult than that and so are languages. 
We've seen in previous posts some interesting tips and rules to learn the noun gender in Spanish, but still we'll find more nouns ending in a different letter that doesn't apply to any of those. Now it is the time to get a little deeper into it. Everything in a language has a reason to be, but we don't need to explore all of them to learn basic Spanish.
The poster attached to this post is a simple summary of special rules applying to noun gender in Spanish, but to make them more accessible to our students we can work with it in different ways (to diversify is always a great choice).

We can group them by gender, like:

Generally, a noun is masculine in Spanish if it ends in:

• - o: el 
• - or: el amor, el olor, el dolor, el amargor, el anterior, el sabor, el ardor...
• - aje: el coraje, el paisaje, el garaje, el masaje, el mestizaje, el dopaje... 
• - ema: el problema, el tema, el lexema, el esquema, el poema, el sistema...

Regularly, a noun is feminine in Spanish if it ends in:

• - a: la casa, la almohada, la aceitera, la anchura, la daga, la 
• - dad: la normalidad, la ciudad, la verdad, la cavidad, la nulidad, la disponibilidad, la diversidad, la deportividad, la exclusividad...
• - tad: la libertad, la amistad, la lealtad, la tempestad, la pubertad, la facultad, la voluntad, la enemistad, la deslealtad, la majestad...

We can also give our students a list of nouns and ask them to group them by masculine or feminine in two different columns:

tema, mano, masaje, olor, árbol, amistad, canción, igualdad, libertad, problema, radio, garaje, amor, función, maternidad, lealtad, día, moto, peaje, sabor, condición, nocturnidad, mitad, sofá, foto, paisaje, error, formación, paternidad

Masculine nouns	Feminine nouns
el error	la paternidad

Check with this "The odd one out" [in Spanish: encuentra al intruso] your understanding of what we have been talking about:

Check your answers

Children must be taught HOW TO THINK,

not what to think.

Margaret Mead

Lunaprofe 12/05/2014  No comment

Noun gender in Spanish: General rule

To know the gender of the nouns in Spanish is crucial because all articles, adjectives, pronouns... need to agree with the noun in gender when you are making a sentence.
Also, in terms of agreement, the masculine noun goes with El and the feminine noun goes with La, like in 

El libro / La hoja 

[We are always talking about the singular form]

We already talked about an acronym than can help us remembering which ones are masculine and feminine: LONERS. This is certainly a very useful tool to learn this important concept when learning Spanish, but as we always say there are no magic tricks when learning languages but there are patterns that can help us in the process.
The most general rule is simple and easy as you can see in the poster we present in this post. 

• masculine nouns end in -o
• feminine nouns end in -a

Masculine nouns	Feminine nouns
El perro	La perra
El gato	La gata
El niño	La niña
El chico	La chica
El abuelo	La abuela
El tío	La tía
El primo	La prima
El nieto	La nieta
El sobrino	La sobrina
El cuñado	La cuñada

Do this online activity to check if you understood what we talked about:
Check your answers ;)

Related posts:

• An acronym to learn noun genders: LONERS

Education is not the learning of facts,

but the training of the mind to think.

Albert Einstein

Lunaprofe 12/01/2014  No comment