Places in the City - Resources for Spanish Class

My fourth graders are finishing up our Welcome to Our Community unit where we talk about places in the city and describing where we live. This unit is really supposed to be about community helpers and where they work but if you read my last post on spiraling you'll know that I'm having to modify parts of my curriculum. In order to get to Novice High in our Let's Explore our City unit in fifth grade, my kiddos need to learn places in the city at a Novice Mid level in fourth grade.

With that in mind I changed around what I did last year. Below are some activities and resources that my students and I particularly enjoyed.

1. I introduced the different places with pictures and describing Lexington. I started with size - students listed cities of different sizes. Then we talked about what Lexington is famous for (horses and UK basketball.) I have this landmark matching game I bought at the Dollar Tree that next year  I hope to use so we can go more global with talking about what cities are famous for but honestly we didn't have time this year.

Get your own posters here.

2. This video is great for introducing places in the city. I love it because it is authentic - it's made for native speakers (really young ones) and my kiddos get genuinely excited to try and guess in Spanish.






3. Google Tourbuilder is a great way to introduce students to different cities around the world and get in some comprehensible input. You can add pictures and text to different places on the map. I had students tour Santiago, Chile. They loved being able to explore the different places by moving around the street view. Check out my tour of Santiago here.

#highlightreal - I did this with fifth grade as well and then had them create a tour of Lexington. Major fail! We wasted two class periods and got very little done. They just weren't ready for that much output. I was asking for sentences when I should have been asking for just labels. If I try this again I will scaffold it better. 


4. I love following teachers on Instagram and Twitter - I get so many great ideas for class. Recently I saw an awesome activity from @MaestraPlata. She had students using spinners to create longer sentences.  I had my students using three spinners to write silly sentences about what they wanted to do, where, and with whom. My students LOVED this activity. Once they wrote several silly sentences, I had them write more serious ones. Get your spinners here!

5. And finally since I didn't get a chance to do Hour of Code this year I took part of this unit to practice not only places but a few direction words and had students code our Beebots around the city. I made large maps from butcher paper and clip art I found online and borrowed the robots from our STEM lab teacher. The kids had a paper that told them where they should start and where they wanted to go. They wrote the code and then tested to see if it was right.  This was another favorite of students.

I will probably make some adjustments next year but overall I'm happy with how my students progressed during this unit. Most could perform at a novice mid level. Next year in fifth grade I hope to continue to spiral places in the city with Berto y Sus Buenas Ideas. Stay tuned!

How do you teach places in the city? Share in the comments below!