More Spanish

Foto Cultura: Día del monopatín

This content was created as a review for my Spanish 3 class. Foto Cultura 2 is a short post about Skateboarding Day in Bogotá, Colombia. (You can view the first in the series  here.) I hope to review the preterit, clothing and description using the photos, as well as talking about how skateboarding is a past time/sport shared by many different countries. You can see the post on my class blog.

Back from a (too) short trip

I just got back from visiting my dad in Bogotá, Colombia.  I wanted to take as many photos as I could in the short time that I was there to use in the classroom for short cultural mini-lessons.  As I write the content on my classroom blog I will share it here.  I hope you enjoy these Foto Cultura articles.  

The first Foto Cultura article is about La Ciclovía in Bogotá.  Every Sunday and holidays major streets, avenues and roads are closed from 7 am to 2 pm so that cyclists and runners can practice their sport. 

Summer learning: Bacilos y Mi primer millón

Cover of Caraluna by Bacilos

How are your students using their language skills over the summer?  The end of the year is always bitter-sweet to me because I’m so proud of how far my students have come in a year with their communication skills, but I worry about how much they will forget over the summer.  

My son took Spanish in a formal classroom setting for the first time this year.  I was very pleased with his progress.  His teacher did a fine job of including all aspects of the language learning while maintaining a rigorous and manageable pace.  My son was able to talk directly to his step-mother in Spanish for the first time this spring, and uses the language with humor and creativity often.  I want him to retain the vocabulary and language structures until next school year, so I’m working with him informally over the summer to practice and use his skills.  

He loves music, plays several instruments, listens to all kind of genres, and blogs about his passion. So music is my gateway. I hope to share lessons that worked well with him, in hopes that you might use with your students. 

Primera lección

Mi primer millon: Bacilos

I printed the lyrics to the song, and asked Nathan to read and get a general idea of what the song is about.  I felt it was important to explain what “pegar en la radio” meant since it is idiomatic (maybe slang?), but holds the key to the song’s theme.  Other than that I told him not to worry about the tenses or words he did not recognize and just get the gist of the story.

On the way to get ice cream later on that day, we heard the song in the car.  He recognized the music because he’s heard me play it off and on for the last couple years.  We went over the song lyrics together over a milkshake & sorbet (sound like bribery?). I let him explain what he understood from his reading, and I filled in the gaps.  I explained some of the grammar he hasn’t formally learned but has heard (the nosotros command vámonos para Miami and the future tense in será mi primer millón).  I also pointed out formal grammar that he learned this school year like ir+a+infinitive  (Me van a escuchar en la radio) and direct object pronouns in comprarte una casa grande.  

I could tell most of the humor of the song had been lost to him in his first reading, so I wanted to move up from translation to interpretation. I asked him some open ended questions.  

Was the narrator a reliable narrator?

Did he really want to become rich & famous to buy his girlfriend a house or was he motivated by other things as well? What else motivated him?

Why would he feel the need to explain that Paulia Rubio is “sólo una amiga”?

Why does he feel he has to go to Miami to become rich & famous?

I asked Nathan to point out lyrics in the song to support his opinion as we talked about it.  On the way home we listened to the song again, and I asked Nathan if he was better able to make out the lyrics this time around.  He could.

His follow up assignment was to write a paragraph telling me what he is going to do with his first million dollars.  We talked about using the “formulas” his teacher taught him like ir+a+infinitive and pensar+infinitive. 

This morning I read a paragraph about a monkey he was going to buy... Hmmm...

Segunda lección: ¿Quiénes son Paulina Rubio, Alejandro Sanz y “Emilio”?

 

Some thoughts on digital natives in my classroom

Thanks to Ant McNeill for photo via Flicker.com

Many believe Generation Z children seamlessly manage technology for a variety of purposes.  The kids who grew up with the Web, MP3 players and cell phones have been exposed at a much younger age to technological tools that have drastically changed the way we complete tasks.  These same technologies have also added a plethora of entertainment options.  Despite the exposure these children have had to these digital tools, they still compartmentalize entertainment, their social life and “formal learning”.  I believe that students will develop skills that will allow them to navigate more fluidly between each of these compartments, but I have to continually remind myself to be patient about the process. 

As some of you have read before I am fortunate to have a classroom set of netbooks. Many, many things have changed about the way I run my classroom since we have had access to them, but I am surprised every year by the time we spend in class learning or reviewing some very basic digital skills.  These are a few things I took for granted my students knew how to do:

-Email a document to themselves

-Trouble shoot a frozen screen

-Set up a user name and password that they could remember easily the rest of the school year

-Retrieve the password and/or user name if they forgot it

-Find and use a web site’s help center/support

-Embed a link

-Load an image online

-Use a web site’s navigation menu to find specific information if it is not the first thing that pops up on a site

You get the idea... To be fair, many of my students negotiate these tasks and are a huge help in class as they troubleshoot issues with their peers. However many students who successfully use Facebook, do not transfer over the skills they use on that site to similar tasks needed to do work for Spanish class.  This is one example of compartmentalizing.

Here is another example of compartmentalizing outside interests with educational goals. Toward the end of the school year my students had an option to self-select a topic of interest to them and work on it over the course of two weeks.  (I’ll describe the project in more detail in a later post.)  When given the opportunity to select any topic of interest to them and use it Spanish class, many kids really didn’t know what to pick.  Several wanted to do fall back on a traditional report & posterboard.  Not only did they have problems considering their hobbies and outside interests as a viable topic, but some still wanted to print out and paste images to card-stock despite having experience and exposure to several multimedia tools. 

This was not the highlight of my week.  Thankfully I talked to my colleague and Art teacher Rod Vesper (you can read his blog here). He had just visited some students in our district that were part of a 7th grade pilot program that allows students to bring their laptops to school. He was very impressed with the learning and the manner that these kids used digital tools to learn.  Seamlessly.  He also had experienced some of the same issues that I had been working through.  And he reminded me to be patient.  

Our students revert to what is comfortable to them.  They are well acquainted with reports and posterboard visuals.  They are accustomed to teacher-directed activities.  It will take some time to shift this mindset.  Student need to be exposed to digital tools that can be used for learning as well as personal enjoyment.   They need to have the opportunities to develop digital skills to perform tasks for learning.   They need to understand that digital skills and tools are not exclusive to entertainment and chatting with their friends.  These tools can also be used in the classroom effectively. I look forward to having those 7th graders in my classroom in the next couple of years. Until then I will remind myself that I am doing my part to shift that mindset in my classroom. 

If you use digital tools in your classroom, how do you work in the learning curve into your lesson plans?