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!)