Thursday, June 19, 2014

WHAT USED TO BE




As you know the Spanish imperfect past tense is used to describe how things "used to be".  So
use the imperfect past tense describe what you used to do with your family and friends and  how your neighborhood used to be.  Use pictures to illustrate either how things were or how things have changed.  Describe a little how it is now.  {Antes……….     Ahora……….}

Take at least 3 - 4 original  photos to show how things have changed. 
Use 4- 5 photos or illustrations to show how things “used to be”.

Checklist

_______ 7- 8 photos/illustrations used that helped illustrate meaning

_______  Over 15 uses of imperfect tense

________ Variety of vocabulary demonstrate

________Variety of sentence structure demonstrated

_______  includes description of now in present tense

This building used to be called  the National Cash Register Building.  It was an important display in the Lewis and Clark Exposition of 1905 that took place on the outskirts of NW Portland.  People from all over the US and the world came to this great fair.  

The Cash Register Company not only built a state of the art cash register, it was a progressive company that gave employees shares in the company as well as salary.

The Building was shipped to St Johns on a barge in 1932 where it became a church.  After the minister had an affair with one of the parishoners it changed hands a couple times.  Under one owner it became the site for Gypsy burial services.  Now it is owned by the McMinnamin’s  and is one of their many historic taverns.

This space was the Salvation Army Thrift store for many decades.  Many people in the neighborhood used to shop there.  It was cheaper than Goodwill.   It closed five years ago.  It stood empty for several years after the  close.  Now the Vintage Shop that was there is also closing.




This used to be the most popular place to eat in St. Johns. People would come and order tuna melts and root beer floats and sit at the counter to eat and talk.   Next door used to be the best place to buy men's clothes.  They always had great quality.


This used to be the St. Johns Post Office.  During the WPA days the Portland artist Louis Bunce painted a mural in the building.  Later Bunce founded the Museum Art School.  The historic mural still exists even now that it has become the Bahai Spiritual Center.







This building used to be a car dealership. It was very elegant with tall glass windows surrounding an oval floor.   Everyone in the neighborhood used to buy their cars there.   Then competition grew.  Before it was torn down they had a big St. John’s party in the semi-circular glass enclosed sales floor where the band played and people danced.  During the economic downturn  it became a storage facility.












This is the first room I taught in at Roosevelt.  I taught Spanish 1-2 and Spanish 3-4.  I loved looking out the windows of this room.  During the winter, geese would often graze on the grass, sometimes hundreds of them.  One time a student chasing them fell and was covered in poop.










The room also had a lot of white board space for writing vocabulary and leaving it up.



This is my houseboat.  When we bought it, it was  a doublewide mobile unit put on flotation.  We rented a WWII amphibious vehicle to move us from our apartment to our house.  It pulled up in front of our apartment and we loaded everything we owned onto it.  Then it drive to Cathedral Park and drove straight into the water and down to our house.


My husband designed the changes and a friend oversaw the construction.


We used to fish for crawfish but now we know the river is dirty.  We used to swim in the river, jumping in at the top of the moorage and swimming down to the end.  We still do, but we make sure to shower.  We used to canoe across the river to pick blackberries.  We still do.









This used to be the prettiest bridge in Portland.  It still is.




Friday, June 6, 2014

Blogs I follow

This is a difficult assignment for me.   I do not seek out blogs outside of my work  A few blogs come to me via friends, and politics, so that is what I will share.  They tend to be information based blogs, not visual blogs.

My neighbor Andrea has written a blog about aging and her mother since she first moved her mother to Portland.  I had been hearing about it from a number of friends.  When I recently move my father here it became more  relevant.  I think she does a good job of keeping the site simple, using a good visual as an intro, and using good writing to sustain the blog and unexpected or personal topics to keep it interesting.  Andrea Carlisle

Of course the politics of Latin America are of interest to me.  A couple blogs that I follow from there are
Cuba Central
Bolivia Rising

Cuba Central does a good job pulling together a variety of press on Cuba and providing one news source.  They also link to their sources so you can track the accuracy and bias of the information as well as find new sources for information.

Bolivia Rising provides as inside, pro Morales take on Bolivia, a country I visited five years ago.  Since this is a country rarely in the news it is very useful.

Neither site does much with graphics or visuals.  They are pretty much straight news sources.

Two sites I follow for national news offer more in the way of videos and visuals.

democracy now
http://dailykos.com/

Democracy now does a great job doing extended interviews on important topics.  You can listen or watch them on line.
Daily kos is more like a tabloid smorgasbord serving up ridiculous and outrageous news blurbs whose import is not often long lasting but delivered in an entertaining fashion.  It's how I often remember to check out the Colbert report or John Steward both of whom are often embedded in the site.  They are easy to puruse and use lots of graphics in their stories.

For local news, besides the Oregonian whose I occasionally  go to

http://www.michaelmunk.com/  When looking for different ideas on a controversial subject.  Here's a blog that could really use some visual imput.

https://www.chooseculture.org/
http://www.aladdin-theater.com/
https://www.albertarosetheatre.com/

Are the blogs I go to to find out what's going on in town.  All of these are more attractive and vibrant than the news blogs I've been giving you.  The Aladdin site is especially well designed, pulling your attention in to performances you hadn't planned on being interested in.  It's clear, vibrant and easy to navigate.  Chooseculture is less obvious to navigate but does offer a wider variety of performances..
Albertarose is well designed but lacks the splash of Aladdin.













Saturday, May 31, 2014

TEACHING WEBSITES

I use the internet primarily for work, so all the websites that I look at are mostly for getting ideas and information about teaching, which of course is one of my main interests.  I have been very interested in expanding my resources and abilities around what is called TPRS language teaching.  Basically that means teaching around storytelling or teaching around what is happening right now

One of my very favorite websites is http://zachary-jones.com/

This website clearly is professionally designed.  It has 3 distinct sections - Music, Photos & Culture.  Some sections are posted to daily, all offer current issues on these subjects.  The choices are contemporary, eclectic,  sometimes politically and socially relevant and within at least partial grasp of beginning learners. There are also often links to worksheets.  They have a clear understanding of the vocabulary groupings in teaching language so you can look up songs, and other items from the past by vocab folds. Instead of lesson planning, they serve as an entertaining supplement to what you are teaching.  They have a store for purchasing their materials.  I have used selections from them multiple times,

My other favorite website is Señor Wooly's, in fact I like and use him so much that I am a subscriber http://www.senorwooly.com/video (the student code) is in the sidebar.  This is once again a professional website.  The design is  easy to navigate, though I don't find it aesthetically that pleasing.  Perhaps it doesn't have to be.  It's really a delivery system for well written and extremely well produced videos that appeal to kids and hit target vocabulary. The videos can be watched along, with either English or Spanish Subtitles or with both.   The most critical videos are  accompanied by multiple useful grammar and vocab handouts as well as games that kids can play with the songs.

I also like the web magazine Veinte Mundos http://www.veintemundos.com/magazines.  They do more in-depth and focused cultural reporting tailored to teens.  They have a native speaker reader with highlighted (translated vocabulary w/ mouse).  They have good questions on the reading and they follow-up with fun "authentic" videos on the subject.  They also have a fabulous backlog of materials.

I have a number of teacher websites bookmarked, but I confess that I mostly visit them once and glean what I can and move on.  This class has forced me to revisit them.  Kristy Placido  http://kplacido.com/ is an innovator in teaching foreign language and very generous with her resources.  Her website is colorful and assertive. She has made useful categories for teachers to peruse, and he blog hits the hot topics.  I personally prefer simpler layouts.  But I'm an older teacher and she's a younger one.  I like her bold headings for her blog entries.  It makes it easy to peruse.

Senorita Barrigan does a nice job designing for multiple users, parents, students and fellow teachers http://senoritabarragan.com/.  She's made her opening page a visual welcome sheet and put all the practic links in sidebars.  She's achieved a hip look while keeping the site relatively clean look.  The mostly black and white format let's the color stand out, and she uses a limited but vibrant palette of color.

Finally I give you what I think is a poorly designed website, though it may contain interesting information http://mjtprs.wordpress.com/ .  She fails to create an identity for the website.  While she offers an enormous number for resources, they are not organized for easy access and neither the layout, the topography nor the color choices are appealing.