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Subscription for schools, school districts and teachers

Posted by Alvaro under: News

We’re getting ready for our fifth school year with Bablingua and we’d like more teachers to have access to all of our online resources. We’re offering schools and counties a special account for their Spanish teachers: unlimited access to all the icebreakers, cultural corner videos, smart lesson plans, vocabulary cards, games and ebooks published in this website at a low price (check our how to order section for more details.)

If your school or county is interested in this offer, just contact us. We’ll create an account for each school with access to the whole site. Please notice that even if a school doesn’t renew its subscription, all its Spanish teachers will have access to our current content for an unlimited period of time.

We encourage counties, teachers and schools to email us to open their doors to the Hispanic world.



We publish new materials every month so you have a wide variety of up-to-date videos to choose from. These are our resources so far (contact us if you’d like to receive a copy):


  • 34 Icebreakers for different levels, which cover the most important grammar and vocabulary topics. We’re currently working in adding optional Spanish subtitles to all of them, check our progress here.
  • 4 Smart Lesson Plans with all you need to offer a different class based on new technologies and active involvement from your students.
  • 3 videos and activities from our Cultural Corner so your students are exposed to the different Hispanic accents and cultures
  • 4 sets of Vocabulary Cards that will help your students remember and practice vocabulary previously taught.
  • 2 Games easy to use in your classes.
  • A 4-episode story and a documentary about the flea market of “El Rastro”. De Compras en el Rastro is our longest production so far, and it includes a Teacher and a Student’s booklet that will help your students to get the most of the videos.
  • An ebook, Hablan2, designed to encourage speaking from the first day.

 

A different class with a Mexican taste

Posted by Alvaro

Food is a very important part of every culture, and something students usually love. That’s why one of our first icebreakers was about how to cook Spanish omelette: “La tortilla de España”, based on one of our most successful lessons when we were teaching Spanish in the U.S., shows how to cook this famous Spanish dish, that you can prepare with your students as long as you have some cooking facilities at your school.

For those teachers who can’t cook at school or who haven’t got enough time we created the program “Cocina fácil”. In the first episode, we explained how to make gazpacho, another famous Spanish dish that doesn’t require a proper kitchen and that can be made in just 20 minutes.

Following its success, we’ve decided to film a second episode of Cocina fácil, this time about guacamole. We wanted to make something different this time, and “Cocina fácil: el guacamole” is definitely not the standard cooking program. It tells the story of Vicente Herrera, “el tiburón” (the shark), a young man with an endless appetite who calls his friend Julieta hoping to eat something at her place. However, Julieta -a young Mexican girl with an excellent reputation as a chef- is not at home, has no money and only has a few minutes before “el tiburón” arrives. Does it sound familiar? We’ve tried to set a scene similar to the one many teachers face at school: lack of time, money and resources. So… what’s the solution? As Julieta says, it’s simple: guacamole.

The result is a 7-minute video that features optional Spanish subtitles and that you can preview in low resolution in the icebreaker section. As usual, the package also includes a PDF document with activities to do before, during and after watching the video, the transcript of the audio activities and video, and the answer key.



As far as the grammar, “Cocina fácil: el guacamole” covers the formal commands (usted / ustedes) and how to use them with an object pronoun (lo, los, la, las). The vocabulary focuses on recipes, with key verbs such as “añadir”, “aplastar”, “cortar”, “lavar” and “pelar”, and other words related to cooking such as “aguacate”, “cebolla”, “cilantro”, “cuchillo”, “limón”, “maíz”, “tenedor”, “tomate”, “tostadas” and “sal”.

We look forward to receiving your comments about this icebreaker, telling us how the class went. Remember, there is no excuse: you just need a bowl, a fork, a knife and some cheap easy-to-find ingredients to give a Mexican taste to your class. It’s “cocina fácil” after all.

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Come with us to “Las fallas”

Posted by Alvaro

“Las fallas” is one of the most famous Spanish celebrations. It takes place every year in Valencia, and the images of these artistic monuments being burnt on 19th March are so well-known that we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to go there to film it.
It was our first visit to “las fallas”, but it won’t certainly be our last, since we really loved the event, which surprised us positively in many ways. For example, it isn’t as crowded as we expected: there are indeed a lot of people, but since every neighborhood build their own “falla”, there are plenty to chose from. In addition to this, Valencia is a big city, and this also helps us to get close to the “fallas” to record great images for the icebreaker.



We also got the help of Lucía Alcázar, a young girl from Valencia who did a great job for us explaining what the “fallas” are, and interviewing several people to know their opinions. The result is a 15-minute video, with optional Spanish subtitles, that covers the main events of this celebration: a lot of information about the Falles (materials, themes, sizes, etc.), the Mascletá and, of course, the burning of two Falles: a children’s Falle and a big adult one.

The package includes a 5-page PDF file with activities that will help your students understand the video, and an audio file that covers part of the main vocabulary. We’ve kept the grammar very simple, and thanks to that, the pre-building activities, the optional subtitles and the visual information, this video can be appropriate for any level. You can also preview it in low resolution in the icebreaker section to check whether it’s convenient for your classes.

Finally, we’ve included a PowerPoint presentation in the icebreaker that you can use to make presentations about “las fallas” with your students, which will be a great speaking end-of-the-lesson activity. If you have any questions about “las fallas,” feel free to contact us, we’ll be very glad to answer them.

We hope our trip helps us to take your students there, so they can also discover this very special celebration.

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Practice irregular preterite forms while visiting Cádiz at Easter

Posted by Alvaro

“Semana Santa en Cádiz” is a 5-minute video, with optional subtitles in Spanish, that focuses on practicing the irregular preterite verbs. The irregular verbs in the preterite are especially important because they are some of the most used in everyday conversations: decir, estar, hacer, poder, querer, ser/ir and tener.

In the video, two young Spaniards talk about what they did in “Semana Santa.” One of them went to Cádiz, in the South of Spain, and describes all the touristic attractions she visited, using of course the preterite, and especially irregular verbs. The package also includes three audio activities and a 10-page PDF document with exercises to do before, during and after the video, as well as the answer key and the transcripts of the listening activities and the video.

Thanks to this icebreaker your students will:

  • Learn or review basic vocabulary about tourism: aeropuerto, castillo, hotel, iglesia, montaña, playa, plaza, pueblo, recepcionista,  ruinas...
  • Practice the irregular verbs in the preterite through different activities (writing, reading, listening and speaking.)
  • Learn important facts about touristic places such as the Riviera Maya (Mexico), Cádiz and Alcalá de Henares (Spain.)

Please visit our icebreaker section to preview the video in low resolution.

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