More Spanish

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!

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.

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.  

 

Student created storytelling prompts

I love any kind of story, and I enjoy using stories in my classroom.  This year I wanted to move the storytelling responsibility to my students.  One of my homework options is for kids to create a cartoon using the lesson’s vocabulary.  They can use an online site like Goanimate or they can draw it on unlined paper.  Initially I only had a couple of students who would turn these in, but the more we use cartoons in class, the more students are doing as a homework option.

As cute as the Goanimate cartoons turn out, my favorite are still the paper ones.  I find they are very versatile.  My favorite way to use them is for partner storytelling.  I will set the timer to 5-8 minutes and have partners take turns narrating the events in the cartoon.  Sometimes, I will turn that activity into an assessment by having them call into GoogleVoice after a quick run through with their peer, and re-tell the story individually.  Sometimes I will use the cartoons to practice asking and answering questions.  For our semester exam this year, I used different cartoons as writing prompts for the written preterit vs imperfect assessment.

I have purchased several storytelling cartoon books, but none have been as effective as what my students are producing.  The vocabulary in their cartoons is specific to what they have learned or are currently learning, and even the kids who draw stick figures come up with some creative stories that are perfect to use in a partner conversation.  The students who are drawing the cartoons are also reinforcing their vocabulary knowledge.  Many label items or provide a basic dialogue in the target language.   My students like seeing their cartoon used in class, and their classmates provide an authentic audience for their drawing & storytelling.

Here are a couple of examples:

Dana S - Realidades 2: 5B Accident & Injury & Body parts topic

Paige W - Realidades 2 6A: Sporting event vocabulary

 

Flickr for vocabulary practice

I wanted a to write a quick post about Flickr.  I have talked about this Web 2.0 previously, but I wanted to add another usage for what is one of my favorite sites.  One of my homework options is for students to photograph current vocabulary and load it to our class Flickr group.  This year I have 8-10 students who consistently take photos and load them to our class group.  I ask that my students tag the photos with the lesson number, and I can easily create a slide show by selecting the photos with that specific tag.  You can see an example of what this slide show looks like here.  There will be some repetition in the vocabulary words photographed, but I am ok with that. The student photographers enjoy seeing their work as a slide show, and the other students like viewing these photos more than the clip art that comes with the textbook.  This is a great review activity and takes very little preparation on my part, but personalizes the lesson tremendously. 

Literati game for Spanish vocabulary

Happy New Year!!! I hope you had a refreshing break and are ready to get back to your classrooms.

Our family spent several nights this holiday season on board game marathon sessions.  My in-laws gave my son Literati, and as we played I thought I could adapt it for my classroom.  The object of the game is to use 5 vocabulary words  from the stack to write a short story before the timer runs out.  Now the words in the English game are very challenging at times, but I thought I would use previous vocabulary words that my students studied in our Spanish 3 class.  I will make my own cards out of 3 x 5 notecards, and I will assign the cards points based on the level of difficulty of the vocabulary word.   I also want to include a spinner with my game to chose the tense the students need to use when writing the story. Using the  tense correctly will result in bonus points. My students could work in groups of 3 or 4.  This means I would need to create 2-3 sets of this game, and I could use them in conjunction with a couple of other board games like Bananagrams and a story dice game I picked up at Border's last month.  I figure I could set the games up in stations and the groups could rotate from one game to the other every 15 minutes.  I'll post again when my cards are done & to let you know how the game went over.  If you have suggestions on where to purchase inexpensive timers (90 seconds -2 minutes) or spinners that I can adapt for this game please let me know. :)

Student created board games

I have several different posts I'm working on right now, but I wanted to brag on my students until the other pieces are written & posted.  Friday was Homecoming, Class Color Day & Game day for us.  My students created all the beautiful board games in the photos.  I am amazed by their creativity and their effort. What you see here is just a sample of some of the games that my kids developed for the Realidades 2, 3B lesson.  My students designed the boards and the questions as part of their homework.  I really, really think this is working very well.  Feedback from my students has been positive, and my students are actively generating products and using the lesson vocabulary for an audience of their peers. I hope to post the second part of my Favorite Tech Tools soon...  

Google Voice Redux

Sam, a student reporter for our school newspaper,  asked me to name my favorite Web 2.0 applications for an article on technology last year.  Google Voice, Google Docs and Voicethread were the first tools that came to mind.  In this series of blog posts, I want to show how versatile these tools are for the World Language classroom, and why teaching your students to use them will have a big payoff all year long. 

Google Voice

Google Voice doesn’t have a learning curve for your students.  You simply explain your assignment, give your students your Google Voice phone number, and have the students call in.  In January, I mentioned how I used Google Voice for individual assessments and partner work.  I have added some variations on these activities since that post. 

My students practice pronouncing vocabulary terms for homework.  They will call in and repeat the vocabulary.  Although this is a very basic assignment, it helps me figure out what words I need to emphasis and practice from a pronunciation perspective.  

Another homework assignment my students can chose to do is to call Google Voice and re-define a vocabulary term in Spanish.  I will then download the call and use it as a listening activity in class to practice or to review for a quiz.  Please listen to Ali’s example to hear how this works.

Download 1af5b8702b57969f24f8884e4a353e875363165c

My students take partner activities a lot more seriously when they have to record the activity on Google Voice.  Skits and dialogues are done on Google Voice on a regular basis, because I save so much class time by having all partners perform at once. I will then grade the assignment during my planning bell, when I can fully concentrate on assessing my students’ oral work, and not be distracted by classroom management issues.  

From time to time, I also have students call in some of the textbook’s pair work.   They are much more concerned about doing the activity well when it will be recorded than when I am informally walking around the room listening to them. 

My student’s enjoy hearing each other more than the book’s listening activities, so when I have a very strong oral activity, I will also download it, and create listening comprehension questions about what the student said in their recording.  

This year I am using the “add contact name” to their phone number.  When I log in to my Google Voice account I can  tell exactly who called and at what time.  I can’t believe I didn’t do this sooner.  If you haven’t set this up yet, it is quite simple.  Right by the phone number that called in is a blue “Add”.  Click on it and enter your student’s name.  Every time that student calls you from that phone, you will see his name by his message. 

Another reason why I am such a Google Voice fan, is that I can give my students direct feedback by texting them (if they call from their cell phones).  If the activity is done in front of class, I tend to give my students positive feedback, because speaking in front of peers in a Spanish can be intimidating.  However, it a student is repeating the same mistake over and over on a Google Voice message, I can simply send a quick text from my computer, and give the student constructive feedback without embarrassing her in front of her peers.

This year I want to finding ways to use Google Voice for informal and unscripted conversation practice.  There is a 2:30 minute limit on each call, so I haven’t successfully come up with an activity that gives my students the think time they need at this level to record a spontaneous exchange.  If you have any suggestions, please share!  I’m always looking for creative and efficient ways to assess speaking skills. 

Vocabulary practice in action

Every year I have at least one good idea.  Sometimes it is a lesson, sometimes it is a way of doing things more effectively.  My good idea has come kind of late this year, but I am very excited about it :)

A few week ago I blogged about a brainstorming session my department had on what kind of vocabulary homework to give our students. I was having problems with my Tic-Tac-Toe idea, so I opted for this assignment.  It allows students to select from a variety of activities.  I think there is a balance between the kind of work they do and the points they earn from it, and I believe that the point value also reflects the time each activity will take to complete.  My students will also have some flexibility with what is due when. If a student has a lot of homework in other classes on Tuesday, maybe she does an activity that is not as time consuming Tuesday night, and does the activity that requires more time Thursday. The important thing is that she is at least doing something with the vocabulary outside of class for at least 3 nights out of the week.  

Anyway... I rolled out the homework plan this week, and I am very pleased with the results.  Here is a link to our class wiki where I put some of the digital products.  Everything under 8B is student produced... and those are just the digital products.  I'm going to try and post or figure out a way to showcase some of the non-digital work.  I have had 3 rap songs created, numerous drawings and crossword puzzles, 5 short stories, and tons of kids practicing pronunciation and spelling with traditional vocabulary activities. 

I have positive feedback so far from the students.  I'm going to have them take a survey after we have done a couple of vocabulary units to get "official" feedback.  As far as grading goes... I am working on a system to make it more efficient.  Looking over the work is no more time consuming than traditional paper/pencil homework.  What I find myself doing is trying to incorporate the outstanding products into my class as a warm up or for those last 5 minutes of class, and that is taking some additional planning time. 

Vocabulary practice

My students are not retaining vocabulary this year.  I like our textbook, and I think it does a nice job of recycling vocabulary, but a large number of my students do not spend enough contact time with the vocabulary outside of class.  The traditional workbook and worksheets are not helping at all.  I think many kids just write down words to be done with the assignment or copy from a peer. So I have been brainstorming what kind of homework I can give that will be more useful for them.  At this level, I believe practice with vocabulary is what they really need, so during our March inservice our Foreign Language department got together to brainstorm activities that students can create to practice vocabulary.  We wanted a list of activities that would appeal to a variety of students and intelligences, and most important, I wanted activities that were tangible and student produced.  This is what we have come up with so far.  After our spring break, I plan on rolling out the options.  I will pick 9 activities & put them on a Tic-Tac-Toe grid & have students select 3 activities in a row to complete per week.  That will be their homework.  Since I teach 5 sections of the same level, I will stagger the due dates to make it manageable to grade.  Most of these activities will be a completion grade, but I will provide my students with 5-10 minutes every other day to use the activities they created in class with their partner(s) or co-operative groups.  Any additional ideas or suggestions are always welcomed :)