Super Site Sábado #9

I am beyond thrilled to share this week's super site with you all today!

Not only is it a creative, innovative and rockin' place for Spanish learners, but I actually had the opportunity to interview the site's creator, and feel honored to share what I learned from him with you all today.

Rockalingua.com is a site chalked full of songs, animated videos, games and more to get kids excited and motivated to learn basic concepts in Spanish. As those of us who are teachers of second language learners know, teaching through song is one of the best ways to reinforce concepts and vocabulary for our students. 

Cesar Chinchilla, this super site's founder has even more to share with you about how the site came to be and what it has to offer in the interview I conducted with him shared below!

So without further ado...

Cesar, please tell Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I am originally from Madrid were I used to teach English to Spanish speakers. 7 years ago I moved to San Francisco, and now I teach Spanish to English speakers.  Music is my main teaching tool.

How was the idea for Rockalingua born?

When I moved to San Francisco and I started teaching Spanish I could not find quality materials to teach Spanish so I started to write songs to teach vocabulary and basic grammar structures to my students. They loved the songs so I kept writing more. After 5 years of writing songs and seeing that they worked great with my students I decided that I wanted to do something with them to help other teachers and Spanish students. I contacted Daniel Fernandez, an old friend of mine and a professional cartoon animator to turn all my songs into animated music videos and that’s how Rockalingua was born.

We know the site offers some incredibly videos for teaching students basic concepts in Spanish, what else does it have to offer and how does it all connect?

  

On the website there are 5 different sections: videos, songs, games, worksheets and picture dictionaries. Each video and song introduces a topic and each topic has a related worksheet, picture dictionary and interactive set of games to review and broaden everything learned on the video and song. All is really well connected. If you are, for example, using the video on numbers at the right of the website you will see the related content so you can easily access the worksheet about numbers, or the games about numbers.

How do you go about selecting content for a video/song?

 I write songs about topics that are relevant to Spanish class. My songs cover concepts that all Spanish students need to learn. Some are very basic such as colors parts of the body or daily routines but I have lately been working on new songs that I will upload soon to the site that covers, verb conjugation, prepositions and irregular verbs that will make the learning of this tricky concepts fun and easy.

What do you currently have in the works? 

 We are constantly creating new content, writing new songs, creating new videos, and worksheets that we upload regularly to the site.  We are  also designing a memory game that we will  add to our game selection

Anything else you'd like to share with readers? 

Thank you so much Krista for this interview (but seriously, THANK YOU, Cesar!) 

I want to invite everyone to explore Rockalingua, there are a lot of free resources and everyone can do a limited free trial that will give them access to all videos and songs for a week.

Thank you so much and enjoy the music!

Not only was Cesar generous enough to take part in the interview, but he also was more than willing to co-host a giveaway with me for all of you!

That being said, one lucky winner will have the opportunity to receive a free 1 year subscription to Rockalingua to utilize with your class, your kids, yourself (whoever you'd like!) 

Did I mention this is a $149 value! Wowzas!

But wait...there's more...Another lucky winner will receive a copy of a DVD containing the Rockalingua videos Cesar and his team have worked so hard to create! 

That's two winners in all folks! The giveaway will run from now until midnight next Saturday. 

Check out the Rafflecopter below to see how to enter.

a Rafflecopter giveaway