La Familia activities and 2 FREE Resources!

La Familia is a fun unit and I always learn a ton about my students - mostly who is related to who because even though I can remember all 500+ names I never realize who is whose brother or sister.  Here are some songs and activities that my students really enjoyed. 

My students love the following 2 songs. They're super catchy and you might find yourself singing them in the shower. 

I also love love love the interactive activities on the website Victoria Languages Online. Their family module is perfect for novice learners of any age. Since I don't have enough computers we rotated and did them with centers. The other two centers were a magnet center where students spelled out the different family members and a book center where I had different books that they could read about families.

And because I love to integrate math we also graphed who had brothers and sisters. We did it first in whole group using an anchor chart. (I recommend laminating it so you can write on it, then wipe it off, and do it again for the next class.)

Next, we did it again but students filled out their own graphs. Get a FREE copy of the graphing page here.

So yeah this graph came out looking interesting. Jajaja - luckily my friends just saw an upside down T. 

But my favorite set of activities came from Gap Minder. Have you guys heard of the website Gap Minder? It is seriously  awesome. I discovered it in a Facebook group this past school year and me and my students had a great time looking at how people lived around the world. 

Julie from Mundo de Pepita gave me the idea of looking at the different families and counting the different family members. First, students traced the different family members. Then we looked at pictures of families from different continents (which we had studied during our weather unit.) 

I had checked with one of the classroom teachers beforehand and she told me that they were working on and needed practice with tally marks so we kept a running tally of the different family members we saw in each picture. Later we counted by 5s and wrote the numeral next to our tally marks. This part was actually pretty difficult for most of my English speaking students but was a quick way to hit some core content with my heritage speakers and gifted students. 

In the next class I had students write out the members of their own family. Then we did the Kagan structure Hand Up, Pair Up and they walked around and described their families to each other. Get your FREE copy here!

Finally, students drew family portraits. I had them listen and draw the different body parts as I said them in Spanish (great throwback to our body parts unit in kindergarten) and then they labeled their pictures and again shared them with each other and the class. Fun for Spanish Teachers has a great La Familia Activity Set that I got the frame from. I also printed her cards and gave them to my first grade classroom teachers. They put them in their morning boxes so kids could practice outside of  class.

What are your favorite familia activities? Share in the comments below or on Twitter using the hashtag #earlylang!