Flippity - My New Favorite FREE Resource for the World Language Classroom

 Have y'all heard of Flippity? Because it is my new absolute favorite resource to use in class. The only grade level that I haven't used it with yet has been kindergarten (and that's only because I'm too chicken to get out the chromebooks with them.)

Flippity is a bunch of free google sheets templates that become interactive games and manipulatives you can use in class. They can be customized for any subject or vocabulary. The matching game and the flashcards are my new favorites because you can add audio! Audio! The students can hear the words over and over as they practice them. 

Ways I've used it class so far...

Flashcards- students practice new vocabulary. You can also turn on the audio to hear each word.

Matching game - students race to match the cards. You can set it to have audio so students can hear each word. I usually have the word match to a picture (that I usually pull from flaticon.com). 

Manipulatives - students can drag pieces to do different things. In the picture below, third graders created sentences about what they did in each room of their house. In second grade I had different habitats and animals. Students sorted the animals under the different habitats. 

Board game - students roll the dice in the middle of the board and move their piece. In this game I had first graders name the food and say if they liked it or not in Spanish. On the dollar spaces, they clicked the card deck in the middle and had to add two prices together and answer in Spanish. 

There are a bunch more template but these four are my go tos at the moment. 

Pros:

Easy to use

Customizable to the vocabulary & content you want students to practice

AUDIO! You can set the audio to Spain Spanish or Latin American Spanish

FREE!

Students love playing the flippity games

Cons:

You can't track student progress or see who has completed what

It can take a minute to set up until you get the hang of it

Have you used Flippity? I'd love to know how you're using it. Share in the comments below!

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Money Around the World - Teaching About Shopping in the Spanish Classroom

 My fourth graders recently finished a unit on shopping and it was super fun! I haven't done this unit in several years because I seem to run out of time and I've focused on other things (mainly things I knew would be on the district benchmark assessment) but we revamped our district K-5 curriculum this fall and I brought this unit back with a bang!

Be sure to read to the end for a FREE RESOURCE!

I started by introducing different currencies by posting a link to a Thinglink. Students clicked on the arrows to see images of the difference money. I also included a link to this currency conversion site so that students could play around with different numbers. 

I also added money visuals to my wall map. Students of all grades loved looking at what $5 around the world looked like. 

My fourth grade students have already been using numbers during our calendar & weather time to talk about the date and the day's temperature but we practiced some more with a guessing game. This simple game was seriously one of their favorite things to play and it got super noisy!

Then we watched an Edpuzzle video and answered some questions about the different prices that we heard. 

They also read real school supply lists from different Spanish speaking countries and put the items they needed into their shopping carts that I created on jamboard. Later they took turns telling a partner what they needed and the partner put those items in their cart. 

We also started class with a warm-up where they looked at shopping ads and practiced asking ¿Cuánto cuesta? and answering with the price. 

This was also a great way to review some of their math standards like rounding.

They worked again with a partner to create prices for different items in their own shops - practicing ¿Cuánto cuesta? and numbers again. Then I had them walk around and ask each other how much different items cost. Whoever had the best (ie. lowest) price won a point. This turned out to be hilarious because I hadn't told them we were going to play this game so some of them had absolutely outrageous prices. 

We didn't have time to do a full on shopping roleplay game but for their interactive notebooks, they made these cute shopping bags. On the outside they wrote a shopping list and on the inside they drew the items and wrote the prices. Overall, it was a high interest and high engagement unit. 

What do you include in your shopping units? Share in the comments below! 

Click here to grab a whole bunch of authentic resources - school supply lists, back to school ads, infographics, and classrooms around the world. 

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