Review on Curriki as a Resource for Spanish: Middle Level

 This is a review on Curriki for teachers of Spanish on Curriki. Curriki is called the K-12 Open Curricula Community. it is described as a non profit, empowering educators to deliver and share curricula.  There is a lot of material  in Curriki, all written by teachers for teachers. When looking for specific material you have some search options. Your search is refined by grade and subject, and then by “type”. Your choices for type of resource are: any, interactive, video, podcast. The types of resource choices are: any, exercise, unit, lesson plan, games.

Some types of usage have more offerings than others. The “exercises” choice has the most to offer. I was hoping that there would be more material specifically for  Spanish. There is plenty of resource, however there are a variety of language offerings, so it is not specifically grouped for Spanish. You have to weed through the all of the other language offerings to find your subject. When you make your selected resource choice, the content is displayed. There is also a bar at the top which allows your to find more information regarding the resource, such as, standards connections and comments. I would definitely use some of the material in Curriki, and even found one lesson that I may use in class tomorrow! I could also add it to my portaportal site. So, a resource that could use occasionally with students and/or add it to my portaportal site. Students could even go to Curriki directly and work on material.  If you join and become a member of Curriki you can review the material and post a rating using a  5 star system, 1=lowest,  5= highest. The lesson plans are written by teachers and reviewed by teachers.  

Here comes the heads up: if you are choosing popular thematic lessons then you might find more extensive vocabulary and sentence grammar construction in Curriki resources ( the ones I checked at least).This can obviously be quite confusing for students, not to mention, frustrating for you, the teacher!  For example, in your instruction, if you have included only one word for the color “purple,” and the resource introduces another word for the color “purple,” it can be extremely frustrating for the learner who may now distrust you as their instructional source. You are now a source whose credibility is in serious question with your fifth grade! A source who may have given faulty information..... according to student developmental estimation! Anyway, many of the material resources had this extended vocabulary and grammar additions to basic thematic lessons. So you will have to decide whether or not it is suitable to what you have been teaching, or requiring students to understand at the time. Oh, the joys of second language teaching and finding appropriate resources!