You now begin the second half of this module.

Objectives for this topic

To be able to say and understand dates
To use a variety of question words

Introduction

In this topic, you will learn to say dates and the days of the week in Spanish. You will also meet some new question words when working through the topic.

Working through your course book

Please work through the following sections in your coursebook, completing all listed exercises:

Page 14 Exercise 1: Listen to Audio Track 9 and the pronunciation of the months and repeat them. Then, write the months of the year out in the correct order. You will find it easy to learn the months, as they have very similar spellings to the English ones, with the exception of enero (January).

LISTEN - Audio Track 9

Page 14 Exercise 2 – Match the dates in the boxes with their equivalent in Spanish. Can you see how the word order differs from the English?
Page 14 Exercise 3. There are two dates that you did not use in the previous exercise. Write them out in Spanish.
Read the ¡Atención! Box on page 14 and practise saying your birthday in Spanish.
Complete Exercise 4 on page 15 by listening to Audio Track 10 and writing down the birthdays that you hear:

LISTEN - Audio Track 10

Now we are going to learn the days of the week! Listen to Audio Track 11 and repeat the days of the week to learn them. Remember - an important difference is that in Spanish, months and days are not written with a capital letter. In fact, you will generally only need a capital letter for people´s names, place names, the first word of a book or film title and at the start of a sentence (You can learn more about this by reading Patrones y Reglas on page 15).

LISTEN - Audio Track 11

Next, complete Exercise 6 on page 15 by translating the dates into Spanish or English.
Complete Exercise 7 on page 15 by matching the questions with their corresponding answer. Make sure that you can translate them into English!
Read the Estrategia box on page 15 about giving fluent responses. Try out the tips for yourself!

Review

Write the birthdays of all your family members. For example:

El cumpleaños de mi madre es el cinco de abril.

As an extra challenge, can you correctly spell the 12 months of the year and the seven days of the week in Spanish? Make two separate lists for this task.

Interactive Kerboodle activities

Log onto Kerboodle and complete the interactive activities for this topic:

COMPLETE - Reading activity: Las fechas

COMPLETE - Grammar activity: Question words

Support activity for this topic

Log onto Language Nut and choose the Topics page. Complete the following:

Numbers and Time/Days of the week: Learn, Practise and Test

Extension activity for this topic

Learn the five question words in the Gramática box on page 15. Turn to page 22 to find out their meaning. Can you use them to create some basic questions?

For example:

¿Cuántos años tienes?

¿Cómo estás hoy?

Don´t forget the upside-down question mark (¿).

Check your answers

If you would like to check your answers for this topic, you can do so by consulting the Claro 1 module answers for Topic 1.4:

CHECK - Topic 1.4

Grammar Alert

Read the Gramática box on page 15. Read and learn these question words, focusing on the spelling, as they can be quite challenging. Complete Exercises 2 and 3 on page 22 to practice question words further.

Vocabulary

Review the vocabulary section ¡… y que cumplas muchos más! (And many happy returns!) on page 28.