 useful for establishing meaning, let’s avoid the guessing games, ACTFL’s recommendation is 90% TL – but I also know that I speak way too much English in class, so I wanted to see how much I could do in Spanish, establishing meaning in other ways. Here’s what I did:
I’m starting Realidades chapter 3a, which is the food chapter. I decided to start with drinks, mainly because I saw a great demo by Lee Burson and Erin Smith at FLAG a few years ago, which gave me a good idea of how to get lots of reps. I gave them a handout with some glasses and mugs, with lines to write their vocab at the bottom. I modeled on the doc cam, writing the word on the blank, and then coloring the appropriate cup to represent the drink. Throughout, I asked questions, starting with te gusta questions, continuing with ¿Bebes _____ en el desayuno?, comparison questions (¿Prefieres jugo de naranja o jugo de manzana?), and open ended questions – ¿Qué tipo de refresco prefieres? ¿Qué bebes en el almuerzo? I had a plastic apple and orange that helped establish meaning for apple and orange juice, we drew a cow for leche, for refresco I gave brand name examples, and té dulce I gave a quick translation for. Minimal English? Check! Engaging? Kind of. I really have a great group of kids first period, who put up with the amount of questions I asked with out getting too squirrelly, but it would not work (or at least for not as long) with my 4th block group. After all the listening and sitting still, I gave them a simple survey activity to complete with a few classmates – ¿Bebes _________?/Sí, mucho/a veces/todos los días/No, nunca. I had to translate the frequency phrases, but they definitely needed a change of pace and this worked well.
In Spanish 1, I’m currently teaching the school unit (Realidades 1 Chapter 2a) My school switched to block schedule this year, so with my students only having four classes, my usual context for practicing ordinal numbers no longer works. So, today we made fake schedules and talked about them.
Step 1: Make fake schedules
I printed out my class vocabulary and electives list from Quizlet as flashcards and divided them into 8 buckets (my students currently sit in groups of 4). Students drew a class from the bucket and wrote it into their schedule, and added a teacher.
I gave students a list of questions and put on an interval timer. Each group picked a leader who asked questions from the list. When the timer beeped, they rotated leaders. After a few minutes, I took over the questioning (to the whole class). I projected Class Dojo on the board and had a student use the interactive pen to assign points (doing this on the projector works GREAT because the other students make sure the score keeper is accurate).
Step 3: Repeat
I was pleased with the participation in this activity, but some of the pronunciation was not so good – not surprisingly because we haven’t worked extensively on these questions yet. So I typed up the questions in Quizlet. Tomorrow, I’m going to get someone in each group to pull up the Quizlet set on their phone or tablet (or lend them my laptop or let them sit at my desk if no one in the group has a device). We’ll shuffle the questions, and let Quizlet ask the questions instead of the students! Next semester, I’ll have Quizlet ask the questions on day 1 and let students as the questions on day 2.
If you want a word document of my questions, here is the link. I wrote 42 questions because that’s how many blocks are in my $3 Jenga knock-off “Jumbling Towers,” so the list can do double duty if we do stations this unit.
PS – My kiddos are ROCKING the groups of 4. I love it.