Two new students this week, but otherwise it was business as usual.
Week three covered:
- more past tense! additional practice with pretérito perfecto and the introduction of pretérito indefinido
- pronouns for direct and indirect objects
- new vocabulary: crimes, body parts, and animals (hmm… sounds like the setup for an episode of CSI)
In comparison to the previous two weeks, I can tell that my progress is becoming less dramatic week over week. This makes sense and is not a complaint with the school or myself; I can pick up on much more of the actual meaning of sentences than I could after the first week! I’m reaching a point where I feel like I need practice more than additional grammatical structures, so I think heading out into the world (well, Spain) at the end of next week is quite timely.
On Friday we had a “field trip” to the pedestrian boulevard along Avenida de la Constitución. Each student had looked up a particular “important” person from Granada, and as we came upon their statue, the student had to describe (in Spanish) who they were, some basic biographical information, and why they were important to Granada.
One of the activities this week was an “International Dinner” where students were encouraged to bring a “typical dish from your home country” to share. This sounds easy, but can actually be quite a challenge at every step – some ingredients can be quite hard to find and the kitchens in the student apartments are generally not well equipped.
I like to make desserts for pot lucks, but wasn’t able to come up with something that I could make without an oven AND find all the ingredients for. In the end I fell back on the most American of American foods, the lowly PB&J. (And a bottle of “organic” wine.)
