Boletín 100 - La lengua vasca, Rozalén and la igualdad de género.
Boletín 100 - La lengua vasca, Rozalén and la igualdad de género.
2 years and 8 months.
100 issues!
300 authentic texts.
About £900 on Adobe Creative Cloud.
1079 subscribers as it stands.
Approximately 25,000 words.
658,861 downloads. A dubious figure provided by TES.
The help of numerous fellow teachers with proofreading and translating.
Countless time looking for inspiration, editing, drawing and designing.
When I started Boletín nearly three years ago I often wondered whether I could remain as committed to it as in the early days of the pandemic.
I wondered too if I would make it to the 100th issue. I thought production would slow down as I exhausted every source out there. Number 100 is now here and the past three years seem a blur but the issues keep rolling out and my bookmarks folder is full to the brim.
I wanted to create a special edition for 100 but I’m a full-time teacher so time is precious, hence there’s nothing special about it but it still packs the same goodness I hope every other issues contains. Three authentic topical texts, challenging grammar in context, a unique design and an exam style question. For this issue I have uploaded the index of topics and exam questions.
This week source text one is about a 2000 year-old bronze ornament inscribed in the basque language which has rewritten the history of the basque language. Source text two is about Rozalén whose latest album includes songs sung in Spanish, Catalan, Basque and Galician. Finally, source text three is about a Spanish school doing things differently by providing extra-curricular classes for both boys and girls to learn domestic tasks as well as electrician, plumbing and carpentry courses.
Grammar to look out for this week
Past particples acting as adjectives
The conditional tense (irregulars)
Superlatives
The present perfect
Avoiding the passive with a se structure
Relative pronouns
Reflexive verbs
Infinitive verbs used when in English we would use a gerund (-ing verb)
Infinitive structure
Subjunctive extended opinion trigger
A Level structures to learn
Darse a conocer - this verb phrase means nearly every variant of to become well-known, to announce, to put on the map. It regularly comes up in the reading and listening paper. How could you include it in a sentence?
Al + infinitive - Al followed by an infinitive means on/upon. This structure appeared in the 2022 WJEC unit 2 paper.
e.g Al llegar a España - Upon/On arriving in Spain.
Haber - Haber is the infinitive of the auxillary verb he/has/ha/hemos/habéis/han which you may recognise as the first part of the present perfect. When haber is preceded by a pesar de/después de and followed by a past participle you can form some quite complex structures.
e.g Después de haber llegado a España - After having arrive in Spain
A pesar de ser fuerte es también frágil - Despite being strong she is also fragile
Thanks for making it this far. If you’re new around here then here are a few issues I enjoyed making which you might like as well.
Some of my favourite issues
Boletín 93 - A special illustrated Spanish Civil War issue.
Boletín 74 - An illustrated LCDBA issue on secondary sources
Boletín 83 - La identidad regional
Download edition 100 in the normal place. Right here.
Next week’s issue is nearly complete and will be based on three top tourist attractions in Spain. See you then!
Ollie
👍🏻
Boletín extras
I have uploaded a double-sided page containing an indexed list of all topics/sub-topics and exam style question types here. Within the department we are looking at the item level data from the mocks and certain students targetting certain question types will be a strategy moving forward to improve exam technique.
There is also a PDF download available of the front cover which is here.