¡ven Conmigo!: Student Edition Level 1 2003 [Spanish]

I will use this book for the first time this school year to teach Middle School Spanish. In planning, I have been impressed with the resources the publisher offers for teachers. The book focuses on culture, connections, and communication and excludes in-depth explainations of the fine points of grammar, making it an ideal roadmap to a dynamic exploratory (or connections) class. The publisher offers many resources to bring the language to life for students in a classroom setting. Many ideas for promoting discourse are included. Again, it seems ideal for an intro level class for adolescent students.

We used the Ven Conmigo series in my highschool Spanish I & II classes, and I found the textbooks very helpful. I guess the textbooks don't lay out every detail step by step--students need to take a certain amount of initiative for the learning process (like reviewing vocabulary on thier own time, participating in group work, and so on). These might not be the most appropriate textbooks for independent study though since a lot of the material is based on group activities, in class listening and videos, etc. Also, the guidance of a teacher (preferably a good one) goes a long way when attempting to create an excellent or great learning experience while using a good or even great textbook. Our highschool also used the parallel German series of these textbooks(I don't remember what it's called), and I also found those textbooks to be very easy to learn from.