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More on "Juego de naipes"

On Wednesday I described how I modified an activity that was brought to my attention by the very talented Sharon Birch.  It worked very well indeed. My class not only stayed in the target language, but actually engaged in meaningful conversation for most of the bell.

I want to share how I tweaked a couple of things to make it work for my classes.

-I have a couple of large classes, so I had groups of 3-4 students set up to go as soon as class started.

-I had little baggies with 24 popsicle sticks at each group. The kid who drew the card would share information based on the prompt with his group mates, and then each of his group mates could ask him a follow up question to earn a popsicle stick.  The question had to relate to the initial student sentence and could NOT be a yes/no question. 

-At the end of the game the students would add up their cards & the popsicle sticks (1pt/ea), and the student with the most points would earn a treat.  

-If a student spoke English he would have to surrender one of his popsicle sticks.  If he didn’t have any, then the student who called him on his English could draw a card from the stash that he had earned.

Although going through the directions took some time, it was worth it, and I know I won’t have to do so the next time we play.  Let me know how you modify this activity to work for you!

El Mundo de Birch is back :)

One of my favorite profesional blogs to read is El mundo de Birch.  I was very happy to see her new post regarding a conversational activity she does with her kids.  I was soo excited, I created my own to use with my kids on Friday.  You can see the PDF at the bottom.  I wanted the students to be mindful of the tenses they have learned so far, so I set up the questions to include present, imperfect and subjunctive.  I know I will be doing this again when we practice conditional & future.  I can't wait to see how it goes.  Thanks Sharon!

Download Conversación con naipe

You can read about some of the modifications I made to this game here.

Hunger Games: practicing movie/sports vocabulary & subjunctive

First of all a shout out to a new Twitter buddy @srtabarragan, who brought The Creative Language Class blog to my attention with this post on using The Hunger Games in Spanish class.  I wanted to grab some of that Hunger Game energy and use it in my Monday lesson on the subjunctive. 

First I showed them the poster linked in the Creative Language Class blog and had them work with a partner answering questions about what they saw.  If you use Realidades 2, this is a great time to recycle vocabulary from lesson 6A & 6B.

We then saw the trailer in Spanish.  I was surprised to find out how many kids didn't realize how dubbing a movie into another language worked. The actors spoke much too quickly for my Spanish 3 students to understand, but it was a good time to have them practice using context clues to help them comprehend. It's also a good example of language usage at a authentic pace.

I asked my students to write a sentence using the subjunctive to recommend, suggest, insist, etc from either one of the character's point of view to another character in the movie, or from my student to a character or Ms Collins. (You can find an edited list of what they came up with in the PDF at the bottom of the post.)Even the students who had not read/seen the movie were able to come up with something.

Tomorrow we are doing a quick warm up to review subjunctive conjugation with a partner activity based on the sentences they came up. (Also below) The student will first write out their answer & then go over the answers with their partner who will have the "answer key".  They will need to help each other out to understand any mistakes they made.

Download Hunger games student recommendations

Download Los Juegos de Hambre Practica con subjuntivo

I hope you can use some of these materials or lesson plan ideas in your class too!

Scavenger hunt

I have never seen my students so excited! Today was the Spanish 3 Scavenger Hunt. Yesterday students worked with a partner to write out directions from my classroom to anther school appropriate location.  At this location the students on the hunt would find a prize placed by the first set of students. My principals are fabulous to support this activity, and most of our staff is willing to join in the fun by allowing the kids to come in their classrooms to "search" for a clue.  My students are  practicing using  plural commands with this activity, and many realized the value of giving clear directions. Another take-way for them was the need to retain vocabulary from previous lessons.  They didn't have dictionaries or vocabulary sheets with them as they hunted for their prize, and had to rely on what they remembered to be successful.You can find the handout I gave my students here. Let me know if you try this with your students.

Student blogging in Spanish class

I started planning my student blog project last fall.  I mentioned that I had tried a variation of student blogging with previous classes, but didn’t care for the results.  Although it is still very early in the project, I really like the changes I made and the results so far are encouraging.  Let me start off by describing how I organized this project.

Purpose:  I want my students to produce written communication for an authentic audience.  I also want my students to self-select and internalize vocabulary that is of interest to them, and that in turn, they might be able to use in other forms of communication.  Another goal for this project is to allow students to gain confidence using web 2.0 tools, and develop an academic presence online.  It’s my hope that students will continue to write in their blogs as long as they are enrolled in a Spanish class at my high school, giving them a digital portfolio that reflects their growing fluency over the next two and a half years.

I wanted a component of this project to be student driven, so I allowed them to select any topic that was school appropriate to write about.  I gave them a week to think of what they might want to write about.  This has been the biggest difference between previous blogging projects.  Last time I attempted a blogging project, I gave my students a prompt or assignment, and had them write to that.

Audience:  Although I would like for my students to have an audience of native Spanish speakers, I have not been able to successfully find that audience for them.  I teach a total of 120 intermediate language learners, and I believe that they can be their own audience.  I have assigned a specific “blog buddy” to each student.  This student is in their physical class, and will be the primary peer editor during this project.  In addition, I had my students self-select 3 other blog buddies from any of my Spanish classes.  They signed up for their partners on a spreadsheet that identified the blog topic and blog url.  When a student’s slots were filled, the student would need to select a student that still had available slots.  Some students selected blog buddies based on the topic, but most selected blog buddies based on friendship. Each student has at least 4 blog readers, but I have noticed that some students are visiting and reading other blogs beyond the 4 that they have selected.

Organization tools: I am using Google Docs and our class Ning to help manage the organization.  I loaded my class roster on a Google Spreadsheet, and had each student type in their blog url and topic.  I have each of these documents posted online on the sidebar on our class Ning.  Students can always go to the Google Doc to get the url if they need to.  After they added the urls, I change the permission on the Google Docs so that students wouldn’t accidently delete information.  I printed a spreadsheet with the student names and had the students use this one to sign up for their blog buddies.  I kept the hard copy in case I have to refer to it or if the students forget who their blog buddies are.

I did a little research on blogging formats and decided to use Blogger.  Our district is using Google Apps, so the same account that they use for Google Docs, and Gmail should also work for their blog.  Our high school is in the process of rolling out these web tools. Most of my students are just starting to use some of these tools this year, so that meant that my students were using their Google account for the first time when they signed up for their blog.  

I found out the hard way that having more than 25 blog requests coming from the same IP address raises a flag at Blogger, and after my first class created their blogs, my third bell students were denied the requested blog.  I believe Blogger thought it was being spammed. I switched platforms with my fifth bell class to Wordpress.  The same thing happened there after 20 or so blogs were created.  This means that I have students working off of two blogging platforms.  The good news is I get to compare the two, and see which is easier to use for future projects.  The students who were not able to create their blog in class did it for homework.  Both platforms are easy enough to figure out, and with one or two exceptions, the students successfully had a blog to start writing on the following day.  

If you are doing this with a single class, I don’t think you will have any problems.  If you have more than 30 students, you will want to have the students create their blog at home or stagger the classes that are creating the blogs over the course of a few days.

Previously, my student’s blogs were housed on our class Ning.  Although this is very convenient and easy to use, the blogs would not follow them when they moved to Spanish 4.  They can also customize what their blogs look like with both Blogger and Wordpress, and I think it helps give them a sense of ownership over them.   Another advantage is other readers can comment on these blogs outside of our school.  The class Ning has a limited membership, and non-members cannot leave comments.  

I will do my best to write a follow up post on how I have been grading this project, and share a few sample student posts within the next few days.  If you have any experience with student blogging, I would love to hear from you.

Oral Assessments

We are finishing up midterm exams, and this is the first year I feel the test has been meaningful for my students.  This year I set the test up to have three parts: an oral assessment, a written assessment and a traditional vocabulary/grammar section.  

The students recorded the oral assessment on Google Voice the last two days of the term, giving me a weekend to start grading them.  They have been practicing story telling all quarter, and I was very pleased by the recordings.    Students have been telling each other stories based on cartoons their peers drew for homework. The day of the test I took 5 different cartoons and shuffled them all in one big pile. Each student received a different cartoon, but it was a cartoon they had previously seen in class.  The students were asked to flip the paper over at the same time, and I gave them two minutes to think about what they were going to say.  All my students called Google Voice at the same time and talked. The story needed to be narrated in the past tense (preterit & imperfect) and was thematically specific to a lesson from this semester.  I told my students they needed to talk for at least 90 seconds.  Most talked for 2-2:30 minutes.  

My rubric is very generous for this assessment, but I strongly believe it needs to work in favor of the language learner, and reward the steps they are taking toward becoming fluent speakers.  I told them that I did not expect perfect grammar.  Out of 140 students I only had 6-8 who had problems using the past tense consistently, and even those students could tell me a story, they just narrated primarily in present tense.  

Although my students are asked to produce & use Spanish in their Spanish 1 & 2 classes, my class is the first time they are assessed orally. Although they have practiced this activity for over 12 weeks, they were still nervous. Although the assessment is far from a natural conversation, I feel it accurately reflected how each student can communicate orally. 

I would like to do more of these types of assessments, but they are very time intensive to grade.  At 2 minutes per student (assuming I don't have to listen twice), that is 280 minutes or 4 hours and 40 minutes.  I will continue to assess my students with Google Voice, but rather than grade all, I will randomly grade the recordings, keeping track of who I have listened to until I get to all of my students... and then start the process over again.

I would strongly encourage language teachers to include some form of oral assessment for their students.  I really believe it brings together everything they have been working on and reinforces the importance of speaking. 

 

 

Future student blog project

I like the blog feature that comes with our class Ning. However, I don’t feel that I use the student blogs in a meaningful way. Yet.  Previously my students have used their blogs to post written assignments, and I would pair them up & ask them to read & comment on each other’s work.  I found that it would take me longer to read and give students meaningful feedback on their blogs than if they turned it in on paper or dropped the document into a network folder in school. 

I wanted my students’ blogs to be a place where they could write, read and comment on things that were meaningful to them, but that didn’t really happen.  They didn’t have an interest in writing about the topics that I suggested, and really didn’t care about commenting on each other’s work unless it was “for a grade”.  I thought that I could use their blogs to connect with Spanish speaking students, but that virtual exchange has had its own set of issues. Sooo...

I’m thinking of how to make the writing and blogging meaningful.  I’m in the brainstorming stage of a project I want to roll out second semester.  I would like for each of my students to pick a topic of interest to them, and then I would like them to write short blog entries (8-10 sentences) about this topic on a weekly basis.  I’ll probably try it out for 4-6 weeks, and evaluate the project at that time. 

At this time I’m thinking I will assign “blog buddies” so that every blog has at least an audience of one or two students, but my hope is the kids that share a similar interest will visit each other’s blog.  They will need to gloss new vocabulary words for their readers. I also will have them tag each entry by topic so that the posts can be easily found within the class Ning. I will give them class time to work on the draft, re-write and post to the blog.  If they need to gather images or take photos, they will need to do that at home.  

I will have to come up with a quick weekly check list to keep the grading manageable, and a very focused rubric to be used at the end of the project.  I’m concerned that it may become overwhelming to grade, so the final grade will be an assessment of the overarching project rather than grading each individual blog post for each student on a weekly basis.  

So far these are the topics I will suggest to my students: fashion/clothing, sports, movie, music or TV reviews, video game tips, easy craft how-to, food, humor posts like Dear Blank, Please Blank... I hope that once I show them some examples, they will also suggest their own topics.  I think the key is to keep the posts short and encourage topics with vocabulary that is familiar to them or have high cognate usage. 

Sara Conttrell wrote about how her students blog for homework , and she has some great suggestions.  I know that her class size is different from mine, so not all that she does will be feasible for me, but the post is a good resource for anyone else who is interested in having their students blog.

I would love to hear from you if you have successfully done something like this in your class.  Any suggestions are welcomed.

 

Hello (again...)

It has been a looong time!  I have been busy (like all of you) with the start of the new school year.  I have a fabulous group of Spanish 3 students this year, and I just wish I had a few more hours to my day so I could share all the great stuff my students are up to...

I continue to use my homework system.  I really love it & I think my students benefit from it. This year it feels like MORE of my students are doing MORE meaningful things with the vocabulary assignments.  I had a student who follows politics do a political spoof on Goanimate using vocabulary from our lesson.  I had another student write a short story about the Mario video game, using the vocabulary in a very imaginative way. I have two (good) rappers that amaze me with their songs, usually performed live in the classroom (I'll try & tape one soon).  Today I want to feature one special student (Matt R) who is taking photos of the vocabulary and creating a story with them.  Here is the link to the photos he took, using vocabulary from 4A of Realidades 2 text.  I hope to use this photo-story to explain and practice imperfect & then compare preterit vs imperfect. 

How is your year going?  I would love to hear from you if you have tried this vocabulary homework in class.  

 

Ser vs Estar mnemonic poster

I am going to be spending a little more time reviewing and practicing Ser vs Estar at the start of the school year with my level 3 students. I created a poster with DOCTOR ELF as a mnemonic device. I did not know about this device until I saw it on Easiest Spanish blog post. Thanks!  I also want to thank all the people who contribute quality photos over at Morguefile.com for commercial free usage. My Elf photo came from their files :)

Download Ser vs Estar

Standards poster to use in Spanish class

One of my goals for this year is to have my students understand the curriculum standards, and see how the work we do in class relates to them.  I have created a handout/poster/slide to use at the start of the year in Spanish.  The language has been simplified and summarizes the standards.  Feel free to use & happy start to the new school year!

Download PDF StandardsPoster