martes, 29 de octubre de 2013
Recuerda a tus seres queridos con nosotros este Día de los Muertos.
Los altares del Día de los Muertos son una muy bella manera de recordar a nuestros seres queridos, agradecer el tiempo que tuvimos con ellos y reflexionar sobre la influencia que tuvieron en nuestra vida. Nuestro altar ya está casi listo...
sábado, 26 de octubre de 2013
Casi lista para el Día de los Muertos...
Acabo de comprar los cempoazochitl que necesitamos para los altares. ¡Me encanta ver el color anaranjado por todas partes!
domingo, 22 de septiembre de 2013
Mi colección para el Día de los Muertos sigue creciendo...
El Día de los Muertos es uno de mis días festivos favoritos, ¡y llega pronto! ¿Quién quiere hacer galletas calavera conmigo el mes que viene en nuestro laboratorio de Seaver?
The Day of the Dead is one of my favorite holidays, and it's coming soon! Who wants to make calavera cookies with me next month in our Seaver lab?
viernes, 6 de septiembre de 2013
Semana 1
Estimados alumnos,
¡Buenas tardes...and congratulations on creating your first Spanish blog post! Below, I have posted my own answers to the questions I posed to you today. The suggestions I gave you for the portions in English are just suggestions--you can add more ideas. The goal is for your classmates and me to get to know you better!
In the Spanish section, I changed the order of my answers to the questions, as you can, too. You are also welcome to add more ideas to your Spanish post, if you like! My Spanish answers are simply a model for the vocabulary and grammar you'll need in order to create your own answers. Even if you have already published your post, you can go back and edit if you need to--and you can also add a picture to your post, if you like. (In the future, we will often post pictures, because they make for more interesting blogs.) ¡Buena suerte!
Nos vemos,
Sra. Strong
P.D. (that's P.S. in Spanish): If you had trouble inserting accents (á, é, í, ó, ú), the letter "ñ" or upside-down question marks and exclamation points (¿¡) in your blog posts today, here are a few suggestions to help you add them:
1) You can install a Latin American keyboard on your computer. This will allow some keys to serve as the ¡ and ¿ symbols, but it won't permanently change your keyboard. You can toggle back and forth between the US-International and Latin American keyboards.
2) When working on your blog post at home, the keys you use to insert accents, etc., while using Word or Google Docs should also work within Blogger. (This is not true, unfortunately, for the computers in our school labs.)
3) Finally, you can type your blog entry in Word--where inserting accents is as simple as Ctrl + apostrophe + a, e, i, o, u--and then cut and paste what you've written into your blog. This may be the easiest solution if you are working on your blog in the computer lab!
My Semana 1 blog post:
Hello! My name is Melissa, and a few of my favorite hobbies are running, baking and reading terrible novels in Spanish. (I won't name any of the ones I'm currently working on out of respect for their authors.) I was inspired to study Spanish both by the desire to speak it with my childhood friends, many of whom were native speakers, and because I loved the way it sounded. My personal goals for this year are to help my students to express themselves as creatively in Spanish as they do in English and to be able to talk about, experience and share things that are awesome in another language. A personal goal is to run my first marathon (which is coming up in November--I'm just a little scared!). I'm very into el Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), and I have a small collection of calaveras and other decorations near my desk. Here's a photo of an altar my students helped to build in one of our classrooms last year:
And that's enough about me for now! Below is my intro in Spanish:
¡Hola! Me llamo Melissa. Mi cumpleaños es el 24 de abril: soy tauro. ¡Estoy muy feliz porque hoy es viernes! Hoy es el 6 de septiembre de 2013, y son las dos y dieciséis de la tarde. Yo soy profesora de español...pero uno de mis antiguos profesores (one of my former teachers) de español se llama Sr. López. ¡Adiós, chicos! ¡Que pasen un buen fin de semana! (Have a great weekend!)
¡Buenas tardes...and congratulations on creating your first Spanish blog post! Below, I have posted my own answers to the questions I posed to you today. The suggestions I gave you for the portions in English are just suggestions--you can add more ideas. The goal is for your classmates and me to get to know you better!
In the Spanish section, I changed the order of my answers to the questions, as you can, too. You are also welcome to add more ideas to your Spanish post, if you like! My Spanish answers are simply a model for the vocabulary and grammar you'll need in order to create your own answers. Even if you have already published your post, you can go back and edit if you need to--and you can also add a picture to your post, if you like. (In the future, we will often post pictures, because they make for more interesting blogs.) ¡Buena suerte!
Nos vemos,
Sra. Strong
P.D. (that's P.S. in Spanish): If you had trouble inserting accents (á, é, í, ó, ú), the letter "ñ" or upside-down question marks and exclamation points (¿¡) in your blog posts today, here are a few suggestions to help you add them:
1) You can install a Latin American keyboard on your computer. This will allow some keys to serve as the ¡ and ¿ symbols, but it won't permanently change your keyboard. You can toggle back and forth between the US-International and Latin American keyboards.
2) When working on your blog post at home, the keys you use to insert accents, etc., while using Word or Google Docs should also work within Blogger. (This is not true, unfortunately, for the computers in our school labs.)
3) Finally, you can type your blog entry in Word--where inserting accents is as simple as Ctrl + apostrophe + a, e, i, o, u--and then cut and paste what you've written into your blog. This may be the easiest solution if you are working on your blog in the computer lab!
My Semana 1 blog post:
Hello! My name is Melissa, and a few of my favorite hobbies are running, baking and reading terrible novels in Spanish. (I won't name any of the ones I'm currently working on out of respect for their authors.) I was inspired to study Spanish both by the desire to speak it with my childhood friends, many of whom were native speakers, and because I loved the way it sounded. My personal goals for this year are to help my students to express themselves as creatively in Spanish as they do in English and to be able to talk about, experience and share things that are awesome in another language. A personal goal is to run my first marathon (which is coming up in November--I'm just a little scared!). I'm very into el Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), and I have a small collection of calaveras and other decorations near my desk. Here's a photo of an altar my students helped to build in one of our classrooms last year:
And that's enough about me for now! Below is my intro in Spanish:
¡Hola! Me llamo Melissa. Mi cumpleaños es el 24 de abril: soy tauro. ¡Estoy muy feliz porque hoy es viernes! Hoy es el 6 de septiembre de 2013, y son las dos y dieciséis de la tarde. Yo soy profesora de español...pero uno de mis antiguos profesores (one of my former teachers) de español se llama Sr. López. ¡Adiós, chicos! ¡Que pasen un buen fin de semana! (Have a great weekend!)
sábado, 24 de agosto de 2013
Our World Language bulletin boards are ready!
It's official: our department has taken on a new name (World Languages), our summer travels are documented and "shareable," and our department is ready to meet our new and returning language students! I can't wait until Monday!
(Oh, and I'm also testing out my Blogger iPhone app as I enter this tiniest of updates. Note to my students: it's incredibly handy for posting photo blog posts!)
sábado, 13 de julio de 2013
¿Quién soy yo?
Hello, and welcome! My name is Melissa Strong--or "Sra. Strong"--, and I'm looking forward to getting to know you this year!
But first, who am I? Let's see... This is my 10th year teaching at Harvard-Westlake School. I began learning Spanish in elementary school (no, my family doesn't speak Spanish!), partly because so many of my friends in the neighborhood where I grew up on Long Island, N.Y., spoke Spanish, and I loved the way it sounded. I was also fiercely jealous of my friends' ability to speak another, "secret" language, and I was determined that I would be fluent in it one day, too!
So, after many years of study through college and graduate school (go Bruins!), as well as study abroad in Mexico City and many, many travels throughout Mexico and in other países hispanohablantes, I now have the privilege of teaching Spanish at Harvard-Westlake! When I'm not teaching Spanish, I love to read, mostly in Spanish (I know, I know--this is not a news flash in any teacher's bio), run (I ran a half-marathon last year and am determined to run another this year), eat delicious new foods, such as these pastries in the confitería Las Violetas in Buenos Aires...
...bake cookies (perhaps you will soon see evidence of this yourselves...), eat (I will try to convince you to eat some foods that will be new to many of you this year, such as delicious chapulines, or fried grasshoppers with chile, salt and lemon), and travel. Here is a picture from my trip to Buenos Aires in July of 2010 (during their winter--and there was snow on the ground!):
...And here is a picture from my last visit to New York, where I spent some time with my son, Gabriel, and other family on Fire Island:
Two of my guilty pleasures are sci-fi TV series and movies (Battlestar Galactica was the best!) and ice cream, which I consider an essential food group.
So, now you know a little bit about me. I can't wait to get to know you this year, and I am looking forward to sharing some of what I love about el español and the people who speak it! ¡Hasta pronto!
...bake cookies (perhaps you will soon see evidence of this yourselves...), eat (I will try to convince you to eat some foods that will be new to many of you this year, such as delicious chapulines, or fried grasshoppers with chile, salt and lemon), and travel. Here is a picture from my trip to Buenos Aires in July of 2010 (during their winter--and there was snow on the ground!):
...And here is a picture from my last visit to New York, where I spent some time with my son, Gabriel, and other family on Fire Island:
Two of my guilty pleasures are sci-fi TV series and movies (Battlestar Galactica was the best!) and ice cream, which I consider an essential food group.
So, now you know a little bit about me. I can't wait to get to know you this year, and I am looking forward to sharing some of what I love about el español and the people who speak it! ¡Hasta pronto!
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