Can’t believe how fast the week has gone.  Can’t believe how fast 3 weeks have gone!

Our profesor, Andres, is an excellent teacher for a class that has students whose primary languages are Russian, French (Cameroon), Farsi, various dialects from African countries and English (Leslie and me!).

He is very patient, only teaches in español, is methodical, does excellent review work from previous days and uses Power Point extensively for his board work.

For learning vocab, rather than telling us the meaning (in various languages!) he uses images and drawings to convey the meaning.  Following that thread, he has had us build mapas mentales (mind maps) – visual associations.  To help develop the concept, Andres had us do board work to build a mind map.

Last night (Thursday) we met again with our tutors Jose and Teresa here at the Casa but this time a gentleman from Belgium and a woman from our class joined us around the dining table.  We used the time to ask questions about the morning lessons, get help with our tarea (homework) and practice pronunciation.  Lots of serious work but also lots of laughing.

Over the past weeks we’ve moved from simple concepts to more complex (sustantivos, adjectivos, verbos, artículos) topics.  This week we’re into sentence structure.  After thorough teaching with Power Point on the whiteboard, Andres had us do this handout in class with colored pencils.  I love his teaching – he builds patterns for us to follow.

This weekend I hope to get 5-6 hours of study in on Saturday and Sunday.  I spend a fair amount of time with Google translate – especially the audio (Google pronounces the word, phrase, sentence, etc).  There’s also lots of memorization of vocab and verb conjugations.

It seems impossible to keep all this stuff in my brain…!