NOTES FOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

There are 5 introductory practice sets.

For professional development, on this page you should watch the video instructions and work through one of the sets (about 10 to 15 minutes).

For your class, your students should do all or most of them spread over several days. They make good warm-ups, cool-downs, and homework.

While pronunciation is the focus, the practice sets are thematic, so they are primarily for vocabulary development. Pronunciation should always be an integral part of vocabulary building!

Make sure to work the vocabulary into the lesson... for example, use first or last names with family vocabulary, use foods with "me gusta", use Spanish-speaking countries with "estar en..." and "ir a...", and use world languages with "hablan (vietnamita) en (Vietnam)."

¡IMPORTANTE! Put yourself in your students' shoes and pretend you don't know how to say each word: analyze the word first to help you say it, not the other way around.

¡CUIDADO! If you aren't a native-speaker of Spanish, you may find yourself pronouncing some Spanish diphthongs as two distinct beats when they should technically be pronounced as one (or as close to one as possible).