Viz

SPAN 102: Elementary Spanish

Instructor: Linda Burdell
Spanish
Winter 2012

Course Description
This course introduces complex sentences and various tenses and short literary and cultural texts. Students practice all four skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) in Spanish.

Visual Exercises

Here are two different exercises. They are used in Spanish 102 to teach students to learn food words, and to help them understand some of the cultural similarities and differences between the U.S. and Hispanic cultures. The exercises are in Spanish.

The Trash Can Project
Basureros Variados

Students listen to a recording of a food or drink item and then decide where to throw away that item, in one of four recycling trash cans found in Ecuador. Then they verify their choice of trash can container by clicking on the VERIFY button, which then shows them the item, repeats the item and indicates the correct recycling bin.

This very brief exercise took hours to produce, and takes about a minute to complete. It is a worthwhile exercise for students to do. Not sure it's a worthwhile exercise for me to build. Someone with better software skills could have done this much more quickly. Special thanks to Fiona MacNeil for trying to teach me InDesign.

The Markets
¿Dónde los encuentro? PowerPoint (PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx) 94.1MB Dec13 12)

This exercise shows close up pictures of items on supermarket shelves. Students have to say whether these are items found only in the supermarket (el supermercado) or also in the the open-air market (el mercado). Doing this exercise in class helps students learn the words for certain food items, and also to gain a better appreciation of the open-air market option for shopping. It also provides a context to discuss packaging (mayonnaise in a bag) as well as advertising (Fruit Loops in Spanish). This exercise was quick to build and was well-received in the Spanish 102 classroom.

Thanks to VIZ for helping fund the photography, and the production help to produce these projects.