Category: Writing

Cortometraje Activities

7/2/2016

Videos have gotten an undeservedly bad rap in education land. They are largely viewed as time wasters by parents, students, and administrators. It's too bad really as videos can be a great source of comprehensible input in second language classrooms - but parents, students, and administrators don't likely know what comprehensible input even is. Enter the cortometraje...

Cortometrajes ("shorts" in English) are short movies that tell big stories, some of them even without words. The best ones are creative, interesting, and teach great lessons. When used in the world language classroom, they can provide us with a common story around which we can develop listening, reading, writing, and speaking skills. Best of all, they don't need to "fit" with your unit because the focus is not on the content, it is on the skills that students sharpen while using the content. Since they are typically less than 10 minutes in length, they can be watched in a fraction of a class period with plenty of time left over to engage in communicative activities based on what was seen.

Take a peek at my 5 favorite cortometrajes to use in the classroom. Click on the title of each to check out listening, reading, writing, and speaking activities for each cortometraje.

1. "El Regalo"

2. "El Vendedor de Humo"

3. "Ratón en Venta"

4. "La Nube y la Cigüeña"

5. "Jinxy Jenkins & Lucky Lou"

You can find more cortometraje titles and activities by visiting our store.

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El Tiempo Unit (Week 2)

2/6/2016

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We ended our unit on weather today so I thought I would share some of the activities that we did during the week.

Our goal for the end of this week was to be able to write a brief weather report, in Spanish, expressing the current temperature and weather conditions as well as future temperature and weather conditions.

This will feed directly into my next unit on making plans and accepting/rejecting invitations. Since the weather often dictates what types of leisure activities we may do and when/where we might do them, we will be recycling a lot of these ideas during the next lesson. But for now, we are starting with a written weather report.

Day 1: Our main activity was an interpersonal speaking/information gap style activity taken from my Integrated Performance Assessment on the Weather. Since I knew I was not going to be assessing that mode this time around, but I still wanted to practice it, I just used it as a class activity. Here is a portion of the activity so that you can see the general idea:

Day 2: I wanted students to practice answering questions about weather in both written and spoken form. I grouped my kids by threes and gave each group a set of 15 weather speaking prompts. Each student took on the role of either the interviewer (asks the questions), interviewee (answers the questions), or the reporter (writes down the interviewee's responses to each question). They switch roles every 5 questions so that they get to practice listening, speaking, and writing. This is actually a concept that can be applied to most worksheets if you are looking for ways to differentiate. Here are some of the questions we worked with of varying difficulty:

Day 3: We spent some time on Google Classroom looking up the weather for various cities and writing weather reports based on the information given on the English site www.weather.com.

Day 4: We listened to the song "Hasta Que Salga el Sol" by Don Omar and practiced changing the lyrics based on the vocabulary and verb structures we had worked with during the week.

Here is a portion of one of the activities that we did so that you can see how we applied our new found vocabulary to existing grammatical structures:

Day 5: Today was assessment day! After two weeks of working with weather (one week of listening/reading activities and one of speaking/writing activities) it was time to see if they met their goal of being able to write a brief weather forecast. The assessment was a simple enough concept but really gave them a wide range of things they could have said. I will grade it using the ACTFL presentational rubric for novice level. Download your own copy of the assessment here:

weather_writing_assessment.pdf
File Size:	680 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

So how did they do? It's becoming clearer and clearer with every assessment that most of them are at or soon will be at the Novice-High level, which is our goal for the end of the year. Here are some examples of their writing:

You will notice that there are some mistakes that are being made pretty consistently which shows me what I need to continue to focus on with them. Overall though, I am very pleased with the increase in complexity and detail that they show over a level 1 student dealing with the same topic. The growth is evident by the more sophisticated use of vocabulary and the ability to talk about future weather conditions (rather than only current conditions). They are getting more and more consistent with using complete sentences, which is encouraging knowing how hard we have worked at this. At the beginning of the year, many of them didn't really understand what the term "complete sentence" and "verb" meant.

Many of the lessons used during this week are up in my store. Look for the links to find the specific products or just look at the information here - I hope it inspires a new lesson for you!

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Fun & Easy Activities for el Año Nuevo

12/12/2015

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I have always loved New Year's. It is one of the only holidays that everyone, regardless of race, religion, gender, or age can get excited about. The Spanish-speaking world has so many unique New Year's traditions that I can't wait to share with my students. Here are some ideas for easy, fun and interesting activities for learning about el Año Nuevo while using the target language.

1. ¿Comprendes? - This is a game that my students love and can be played with any cultural information that is not too complex. First, you get kids into teams of 3 or 4. Then, you tell them that you are going to explain something completely in Spanish and their job is to guess what you explained with as much detail as possible. I award 3 points for the team with the most correct details, 2 points for second place, and 1 point for third place. With lower level classes (like Spanish 1 & 2), I give them a few pictures as hints to get them started. In this particular game, I explained 8 different New Year's traditions completely in Spanish using the power point below as my picture hints.

2 - Infographic Reading Activities - there are some great infographics out there about New Year's traditions. Create reading activities to help students figure the traditions out for themselves or check out our ready made activities here.

3 - El Año Nuevo Greeting Cards - Have students create greeting cards, in Spanish, that only wish someone a "Prospero Año Nuevo", but also teach them something about New Year's traditions in Spanish-speaking countries.

Wear red underwear to bring love in the New Year and yellow underwear to bring luck!

Coins should be thrown in the air while large bills should be kept in your shoes.

Sweep your house and throw all the dust out the front door. Walk around the outside of your house with a suitcase to bring travel in the New Year.

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Giving Basic Personal Information in Spanish

9/14/2015

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This week in Spanish 2 we are working on being able to fill out basic forms in Spanish. Luckily, most of our personal information is not written that much differently in Spanish than it is in English. However, there are definitely some new vocabulary we need to learn as well as a few differences in the way that personal information is presented.

First, we started by introducing some vocabulary that would be important to know if you were filling out a form of any kind.

We also identified some essential questions that we will focus on for our speaking rounds this week.

Since this is the second week that we have worked with this material, we are working with the skills of presentational writing, presentational speaking, and interpersonal speaking this week. Last week we worked with the skills of interpretive listening and reading and students heard and read many examples of other people presenting basic information about themselves. So, this week it is their turn to to take over.

By the end of the week, my students will need to fill out this basic form in Spanish with their personal information.

They will also need to be able to provide basic information over the phone. We have chosen to have our speaking assessment be focused on their school e-mail addresses which they must be able to tell me in Spanish. This will require them to use their previous knowledge of numbers and letters in Spanish and incorporate our newly learned vocabulary for @ (arroba) and .com (punto com).

Click on any of the pictures to download your own copy of these files! Also, don't forget to check out our Integrated Performance Assessment on Giving Basic Personal Information.

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You're A Poet, Now Show It!

4/22/2014

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Poetry is a great way not only to get students writing in a way that seems a bit less daunting, but also to increase language awareness. There are a seemingly endless types and styles of poetry ranging from the very simple Acrostic poems to the more difficult Epics and Ballads. This makes writing poetry a reachable goal regardless of how much or how little experience your students have with the language. It also has great potential for differentiation as the type of poem you request from your students may vary from person to person, not just level to level.

Many styles of poetry require students to apply their knowledge of the language. They may depend upon counting syllables, phonemic awareness, rhyming, or parts of speech. These are great opportunities for students to reinforce these concepts by using them first hand.

Here is a great site where you can learn about all the different types, kinds, and styles of poetry as well as see examples:

55 Types of Poetry Forms

For Novice learners, I would recommend starting with Acrostic, Cinquain, Couplet, or Haiku style poetry.

Here are some great tools, supports, and resources for students to use as they begin to write their Spanish poetry:

Spanish Parts of Speech
Spanish Rhyming Dictionary
Spanish Phonics

If you try this in your classroom, let me know how it goes! In closing, a couple of poems written by my students.

El Chico Café (A Limerick)                                        Mi Profesora (A Quatrain)

Había un chico muy raro                                            Mi profesora
Que conducía un carro caro.                                     Siempre está hablando
Un dia, chocó con una vaca                                    La boca grande
Y cayó en una pila de caca                                       Siempre está charlando
Al lado de su faro

I'm sure they couldn't have been talking about me in that last one...nah...

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Cortometraje Activities

El Tiempo Unit (Week 2)

Fun & Easy Activities for el Año Nuevo

Giving Basic Personal Information in Spanish

You're A Poet, Now Show It!

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