Throw Away Your Textbook!Ideas For a Fun & Focused Spanish Classroom
  • Blog
  • True Stories from the Trenches
  • My Store
  • About
  • Contact
  • Store
  • Launch

El Tiempo Unit (Week 2)

2/6/2016

6 Comments

 
Picture
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:

Picture
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:
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
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:
Picture
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:
Picture
Picture
Picture
Picture
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!
6 Comments
Lily
2/14/2016 06:40:30 pm

What do you do about the typos and the mention of cerveza in the music video? Great song! I teach middle school, so the cerveza part would need to be deleted. I'm not sure how!

Reply
Throw Away Your Textbook
2/14/2016 08:33:01 pm

Usually if there are typos that I can't fix (in this case because I didn't create the video), I tell them ahead of time that they need to find X # of typos and make that part of the challenge. They love it when they know more than the person that made the video. It also helps me to reinforce some basic phonics and get them thinking. For example, one of the typos in this video is that they write "ay" instead of "hay". We talk about why that would be an easy mistake for a Spanish speaker to make due to the silent H.

As for the beer reference, my students know that drinking is viewed differently in Hispanic culture. I don't draw attention to it, but I don't delete it either. To me it's all in how you handle it. If you have concerns, you can always send an e-mail out to parents ahead of time. I have never had an issue - most won't even notice.

Reply
Maria S Pacheco
11/4/2017 12:42:59 pm

Hi, the phrase "Hasta que salga el sol" - means to me as a native speaker- Until the sun comes out or rises again. It is said when you party all night until the next morning. It is not when the sun leaves or goes down.

Reply
esfileexplorerapkz.info link
10/1/2018 03:56:12 am

As for the beer reference, my students know that drinking is viewed differently in Hispanic culture. I don't draw attention to it, but I don't delete it either. To me it's all in how you handle it. If you have concerns, you can always send an e-mail out to parents ahead of time. I have never had an issue - most won't even notice.hmmm?

Reply
college essay services link
7/5/2019 08:46:51 pm

If you seek for personal improvement, then even mistake must be addressed so you would know what to do next time. But honestly, all simple mistakes that you did were minor so there is nothing huge to be worried about. What is important is you came up with a weather report that was trulls appreciated by a lot of people. I always believe that you can pull it off because you have always been dedicated on what you do. I've been through the struggle of Spanish class, and its definitely not easy!

Reply
sims 4 cheats link
6/11/2020 12:16:32 am

I just found this blog and have high hopes for it to continue. Keep up the great work, its hard to find good ones. I have added to my favorites. Thank You.If you love pets, let visit game to create a wonderful pet

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Picture

      Subscribe to our Newsletter!

    Subscribe to Newsletter

    RSS Feed


    Author

     I have been teaching Spanish for the past 15 years in a large Suburban School District.

    Categories

    All
    Assessment
    Culture
    Curriculum
    Dry Erase Board Activities
    El Año Nuevo
    El Tiempo (Weather)
    Grammar
    Listening
    Projects
    Reading
    Speaking
    Teacher Resources
    Tech Tools
    Tips & Tricks
    Vocabulary
    Writing

    More Blogs for Language Teachers

    Language Teacher's Café
    Spanish Plans
    Fun For Spanish Teachers
    Open Wide the World

    Fun For Spanish Teachers
    ​
    Island Teacher
    ​
    Señora Cruz
Proudly powered by Weebly