El currÃculo
Welcome! This is an introduction to the features of this website and the ways in which I envision them being used. However, feel free to use this site however best fits you and/or your students.
About this site
This site was made as my senior Fellows project, a year-long project in an area of personal passion. Spanish having long been one of my foremost interests and loves, it seemed fitting that I should find a way to use this opportunity to turn my knowledge of Spanish into an asset for others.
I began developing the idea for this project during my sophomore year. I was frustrated with sites that charged money, or that were out of date and dull, or that were intended for adult learners and seemed completely out of step with a typical high school curriculum. I began a rough version of the website using Google Sites, winding up with a half-finished reference manual to common topics in Spanish grammar. Eventually, after being accepted into the Fellows program and discussing the idea with my mentors, the idea morphed from a bare-bones reference site to a more full-featured instructional site. The site maintained its reference aspect with the breadth of its content and the ways in which different ideas are linked together, but it also gained significant pedagogical value. Content pages are no longer minimal, jargon-heavy explanations of disparate topics, but carefully planned, thorough explanations that are tailored for each level -- Spanish I through III. Additional resources -- videos, exercises, worksheets, printable notes, etc. -- have also been added to make this as comprehensive a resource as possible.
On using this site
This site is intended for all learners, specifically those in high school. Students can move through topics with a class or at their own pace. Hopefully, I have achieved my goal of making the material detailed enough for highly inquisitive students seeking a challenge, while also maintaining a very conversational, step-by-step, easy-to-follow approach for those students that struggle with Spanish.
Please use this site however works best for you. If you are a teacher, you might recommend it to students to help them study grammar throughout the year and especially before tests and exams.
Resources
All content pages contain a Quick Reference section that links to extended explanations on that particular page. This brief overview is perfect for students to review a topic from a previous class or to quickly check a small piece of information -- conjugation endings, for instance, are all in the Quick Reference sections of their respective pages.
All pages also contain links to Next Topics, which link to other topics in that particular level (all links on Nouns II link to other material in level II). These allow students to see how topics relate while keeping them at the appropriate difficulty level. At the bottom of every page, however, there is a Related Topics section with links to all related topics across all levels. This is excellent for both students who need to review earlier material and students who are ready for a challenge, because the content area is held constant as the difficulty level changes.
Some pages contain links to explanatory videos, done in the style of Khan Academy. Most are around ten minutes in length and contain segments in which students are asked to pause the video and produce their own answers.
Some pages also contain downloadable PDF documents. These might be worksheets (students can print them or complete them on iPads; all answers are included), verb conjugation templates, or notes (uses of the subjunctive, overview of all tenses, etc.).
Almost all pages will have interactive, online practice quizzes to be used by the students to help them see if they have mastered the content of that page. Next to these quizzes are two boxes: on orange box that directs students to external resources, and a yellow box with links to the above-mentioned Related Topics. The external resources are grouped into two categories: textbook and online. In the textbook section, students will find the chapters and page numbers with the most pertinent information about that specific topic. In the online section, there will be links to outside websites that are universally free for Severn students and almost always free for everyone else. Common external sites include the grammar section of StudySpanish.com, Conjuguemos, and (for more advanced students) the Bowdoin College site created by Enrique Yepes.