Welcome to Beginning Conversational Spanish for Teachers – ¡Bienvenidos al curso principiante de español para maestros!
Learning Spanish is a process and a journey. Jump into this Spanish learning adventure with this Beginning Conversational Spanish for Teachers introductory course that teaches you the basic Spanish conversational skills you need for communicating with your Spanish speaking students and their families. This course is specifically designed for teachers to drastically improve their Spanish communication skills resulting in more effective and successful communication with their Spanish-speaking students and families in and out of the classroom.
¡Bienvenidos! Meet your Maestra – Leslie Foster
This Spanish for Educators – Beginning Spanish Conversational Skills Course is the first step in the learning process. This course will help you:
- Improve your Spanish in order to better serve your educational communities
- Break down language barriers with students in the classroom and parents / guardians outside the classroom
- Use Spanish here and there throughout the day to make sure all students know what to expect and how to follow your unique classroom systems, rules and processes.
Who is this course for?:
- This Spanish course is for classroom teachers with a high percentage of Spanish speaking families that need to quickly learn Spanish in order to communicate about the following topics with their Spanish speaking students, families, parents and guardians.
- This is a beginning Spanish course for educators and is appropriate for a student that would currently identify themselves as having a novice low to novice high knowledge of the Spanish language (based on ACTFL proficiency guidelines).
Course Objectives:
This course focuses on learning real-life, relevant Spanish that is needed in order to manage the classroom and maintain communication with parents/guardians. The emphasis of this course is to help educators communicate effectively in Spanish with students and parents/guardians who are not fluent in English. This course is comprised of 7 foundational lessons that highlight the necessary grammar and vocabulary to begin communicating in Spanish.
- Lesson 1: Spanish Greeting & Pleasantries
- This lesson focuses on the most needed Spanish phrases to begin a conversation, introduce yourself, ask about your students and begin connecting with your Spanish speaking students, their parents / guardians.
- Lesson 2: How to address your students and their families – Formal versus Informal Communication
- Consider context, relationship and culture when addressing students, parents / guardians, and colleagues
- Lesson 3: Master Spanish Gender
- Learn 8 basic rules of gender so you can know which nouns are feminine and which are masculine.
- Lesson 4: Introduction to the two verbs that mean “to be” in Spanish – SER and ESTAR
- Lesson 5: The verb SER: conjugations and uses
- Learn the many uses of this verb to express more about you as a teacher and to describe your students, your classroom, school and other contexts within education
- Lesson 6: The verb ESTAR: conjugations and uses Introduction to the foundational verb ESTAR = to be in Spanish
- Learn the many uses of this verb to express specifically how your students are feeling and where they are
- Lesson 7: SER versus ESTAR Master the uses of these verbs to:
- describe students, classes, schools, tests
- express profession and more about your students
- communicate about how someone is feeling
- communicate about the location of people, places and things in and out of the classroom
4 Pasos: In each lesson there are 4 steps to complete the lesson:
- Paso 1: Download lesson notes and vocabulary lists
- Paso 2: Watch the lesson and take notes using the lesson notes provided
- Paso 3: ¡Práctica! Practice the lesson objectives in the various practice activities
- Paso 4: Application: Implement this Spanish, right now, today in your communication with students, parents and guardians
Hi there,
I want to do the Beginning Conversational Spanish For Teachers course and was wondering if it is online? And can I do it in my own time
Hola Eadaoin, yes! You can do it online at your own pace.
I am Wendy Harrison. I am a kindergarten teacher in Washington. I am learning Spanish so I can communicate key ideas to my students and so I can communicate with families.
My name is Dorothy Loving and I am a substitute teacher in Chula Vista, CA. I hope to be a full-fledged teacher one day and I believe being able to communicate in Spanish will be a benefit to me, my students, and their families. I am in this course because I hope it “zeroes in” on specific phrases that teachers need as opposed to taking a general Spanish course.
Hola Dorothy y bienvenida a la clase de español! Thanks for introducing yourself and sharing your WHY! As you progress in the course, let me know what questions you have! Keep up the great work of learning Spanish!
I am Alicia, a special education middle school teacher. I’ve always wanted to master Spanish but I always had a reason to procrastinate. Now, I have decided that this is the right time. I have to learn the language or at least memorize some of the vocabulary before the next school year starts. Year after year, the number of Hispanic students keep growing in our school building and being a sped teacher, my caseload list of students are mostly Hispanics. During conversations, I had to have a translator translate what I have to say and I feel that a substantial part of that is lost in translation, especially if the translator does not have a sped background.
Bienvenida Alicia! Thanks for sharing a bit about you and you “why” for wanting to learn Spanish.
¡Bienvenido/a a la clase! Preséntese- let us know who you are, what you teach and your WHY for learning Spanish?