Getting started teaching la familia in Spanish class

One of the benefits of moving from elementary to middle school is time. I have so MUCH time! And with that time we can do so much more. In elementary school I could only get to immediate family and maybe abuelo and abuela, but not much more. In middle school we have ALL the family PLUS how to describe them. Here are some activities that I used with 8th graders. 

Introducing the vocabulary

I started with the same story I used in elementary school - ¿Quién comió mi dona? Someone has eaten my donut and I interview every family member to figure out who. There was a commercial awhile back ¿Quién tomño el jugo? that was very similar and gave me the idea but now I can't find the video. If you have it, please share!

Once we finished I hid a donut behind different family members and they had to guess who had it. Then they played in pairs using Pear Deck. I gave them the interactive slide and they moved a draggable taco to a family member and a partner guessed. You could also do this with paper and a file folder. 

They also practiced with Flippity flashcards and Blooket.  And they loved this old school song (well some of them rolled their eyes but they also were sad when I didn't play it - so middle school!)

I presented them my family and we practiced writing about our families using sentence frames.

Mi familia es ____.

Tengo ___ hermanos/hermanas.

Se llama _____.

Tiene __ años. 

Le gusta ____.

We also practiced these sentence stems while doing Personal Especial interviews (more on that later!)

Listening practice

One of my goals as a non-native Spanish speaker is to expose my students to as many different native speakers as possible. Input is important but varied input is vital! Below are links to different listening activities that I used during this unit. Some were very quick and I just asked comprehension questions in English or I took the transcripts and made them into a cloze activity.

Spanish Listening 224

Spanish Listening 383

Spanish Listening 086

Spanish learning lab - scroll to the bottom of the page for listening exerpts. 

Reading practice

We read books about la familia as well as some reading passages that I bought on TPT. 

Mi Familia Calaca - I wish this one wasn't bilingual but I love the illustrations so I couldn't skip it!

Mi familia es un zoológico - this one is adorable and brings in animal vocabulary as well. 

Mi Familia - this book is a little more involved but it's great for practicing le gusta. 

Federico y sus familias - for this one the vocabulary was a little much so I read it but then asked comprehension questions that were more on the level of my novice students. 

Mi Familia - after reading it, students added details like name, age, and what they liked to do using the sentence frames we had been practicing. Then they read their new versions to a partner. 

To do this I screenshot the pages, put them in google slides, and assigned each student the slide deck so they could write on each page. 

The main goal of the first half of this unit was to make sure that my students were comfortable listing the people in their family and describing their families using the sentence frames. I really focused on different children's books because their final project for the unit was NOT create a family tree BUT to write their own children's book on la familia. 

What are your favorite activities & resources for teaching la familia? Share in the comments below!

Authentic resources for your school unit!

The transition to middle school has not been easy but I'm back with some great authentic resources that would work for any novice learner from 3rd grade on up. 

First up is the chain of private schools in Chile. Each school has a virtual tour and a fantastic Información Práctica page that includes school supply lists, schedules, lunch menus, and uniforms. I actually had my 7th graders look at these and then create their own Información Práctica page for our school in Spanish as their final project for this unit. 

These tours were great for learning places in school

These schedules were great for practicing subjects, time, and comparing & contrasting

This Instagram page for a school in Colombia has some great posts - there are students talking about their favorite subject and one that would be great for adjectives. 

Here's another that is good for reading comprehension rather than listening.  It has several posts for different students. 

This reel is a great opener or review of school supplies. 

This one from Tang Venezuela is kinda weird but fun - it tells you what flavor tang goes with your favorite subject. 

Same idea but with sneakers. I think next year I will have students come up with their own versions of these posts. 

And another one with sneakers

That's all for now - If you have authentic resources related to school share in the comments below!

New school - new look

 Every winter for the last 12 years there have been discussions about ending the district support for our elementary World Language programs and for 11 of those years they decided to keep us around. Mostly because it was usually too late in the year to start thinking of how to restructure things to make it more fair (not every elementary school had a district funded World Language teacher.) 

Every year until this year. This year they finally decided that it would make more fiscal sense to allocate our positions to the middle schools. 

From a district standpoint I 100% understand the decision. It hasn't been fair to over half the schools that don't have a World Language program and this will allow them to get more "bang for their buck." 

From a personal standpoint it has been incredibly hard. I have loved working at my school and the little kids. I'm more than a little nervous about moving up to middle school. 

The good news is I'm going to an IB school where World Language is highly valued! I won't be a lone ranger anymore - I'll be part of a departement of 6! I already have friends who work there! 

If you have followed me for elementary lessons and ideas - thank you! I hope you continue to read along as I adjust to middle school. I suspect (hope really) that many of my elementary ideas will also work with older students. And if you teach middle school - please send me good thoughts and any advice you might have!

Using Beebots in Spanish Class

 My third graders last year learned about places in the community and how to give directions around town - so the perfect excuse to borrow the beebots from the STEM Lab!

We started with learning places in the community with the game ¿Dónde está mi perro? I told the class my dog had escaped and we needed to find her. They had to guess where in the city she had ended up. It's a great low prep way to practice lists of vocabulary over and over. 

We then practiced our direction words as a whole group and then in pairs using worksheets and tiny chancla erasers a second grade teacher loaned me. 

Next up, the students practiced with the virtual beebots. I would tell them where I wanted to go and they had to give directions in Spanish and program their beebot to get there. This time really allowed them to experiment and see how the beebot responded. It also helped that they had played with the beebots in English with the STEM lab teacher!

Finally it was time to play with the beebots! First we sat in a circle and just used one map and one beebot. Everyone wrote their directions and I picked one student to program the beebot. If they didn't make it, then we troubleshooted as a group to debug the code. 

The next class the students worked in groups of four. Like in whole group, everyone wrote their directions and I rotated who got to program the beebot so that everyone got a turn. Having lots of visuals and a set order of who did what really helped mitigate any arguments (though we did have couple.) 

The map I use is no longer available but here is a link to the same site I got it from originally. 

After finishing up with the beebots we have moved on to designing our own communities and drawing maps to put in our interactive notebooks. But more on that later!

Have you used beebots or coding in your room before? Share in the comments below!

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Amate Bark Paintings in Spanish class

First grade recently finished our Animals Around Us unit, culminating in students creating an Amate bark painting inspired artwork! 

In this unit students learned how to say which animals they liked as well as to describe their size, color, speed, and how they move. I will do a separate post where I share what I used for the bulk of the unit - introducing animal names, practicing movements, looking at zoo maps and webcams, etc. In this post though I want to share how we compared and contrasted amate bark paintings and alebrijes from Mexico and then made our own amate inspired artwork.

We watched these videos to learn more about how alebrijes and amate paintings are made. 

         

I also have an amate painting and some mini alebrijes that I purchased online that students could see in person. We also looked at several photos from the internet as well. 

Because this wasn't the main focus of each class period, it did take us awhile to get done. We spent the last 10 minutes of class each time, working on something related to our artwork. First, I had students practice drawing their animals on whiteboards first. I bought drawing guides for zoo animals off TPT and projected them onto the board for them to follow. I modeled and gave directions in Spanish. After one class of practicing, I gave them their paper and we drew with pencil. 

The third class period they went over their pencil with sharpie markers. I can't JUST have them doing art and chatting in English so while they were working, I asked questions in Spanish about which animals were big or small, which animals walk or swim, etc. What animals did they like? 

The last two classes we used kwik sticks borrowed from the art room to paint. Students had to come up and tell me in Spanish which color they were taking. 

Some things for the future:

-Drawing first on the white boards really helped my first grade students practice with the drawing guides and how to follow the step by step pictures. This is a skill not all 6-7 year olds know how to do so it was an important step. 

-The kwik paint sticks were great for clean up in the Spanish room but they are kind of hard for this age to use well. I might use construction paper crayons or send them to art class to paint with real paint and paintbrushes next year. Or oil pastels. 

-There are a TON of resources and activity ideas on Pinterest. Some have students crumple their paper or tear the edges to give it more of a homemade paper look. One blog I read mentioned touching up the sharpie and adding dots and other lines as small details later, which I think I might incorporate next year, especially if I coordinate with the art teacher to have them work on them some in her room.

Do you incorporate art in your Spanish classroom? Share in the comments below and don't forget to check out my other art-inspired posts!

Joan Miro in kindergarten

Arpilleras and Animal Habitats

Picasso Portraits

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Speak Up & Speak Out - KWLA & NNELL presentation

 KWLA Fall Conference was this past weekend and the theme was all about student voice! My session on how to get your students speaking more in the target language fit in perfectly. I also gave this same presentation at NNELL over the summer.  I'm hoping to write several blog posts that touch on the same topics I spoke about but in the meantime here is a link to my slides. 

Practicing New Vocabulary in Spanish Class

Before I go back to school this year I am doing a Back to Basics series. In Part One - Introducing New Vocabulary in Spanish Class (click here to read) I discussed some basics of how to introduce new vocabulary. Once the students have heard the new language, now they need to practice it in class with different activities. 

Way back in 2015 I was lucky enough to attend a two day workshop with Helena Curtain where we talked about deep and rich activities for learners. To sum up, she told us that deep & rich activities have at least two of the following four components - intrinsically motivating, cognitively engaging, culturally connected, and communicatively purposeful. Read more about this here. I try to keep those in mind when choosing activities to practice new vocab in class. 

Here are a few of my favorite go to activities to help students practice and really learn new vocabulary in Spanish class.

1. Silly stories with lots of repitition

When I teach my food unit, I tell a story about how hungry I am and all the unhealthy things I eat. At the end of the story I'm very sick and need to eat healthier. Then we practice saying what healthy foods we like. 

When I teach hobbies and activities, I tell a story about telling a friend what I want to do and they don't like anything I suggest. I get more and more annoyed as the story goes on until I finally ask what she wants to do. When I teach family members I accuse everyone in the family of eating my donut and ask if it was them.

Sometimes I use fairy tales like Caperucita Roja or Cenicienta to reinforce vocabulary such as emotions and body parts or rooms of the house. 

For all of these I have visuals up on the board or story props to help students understand and process the language we're practicing. 

2. Either/Or

I put up two choices on the board and students choose which they like better and tell their table partner. Or show one item and have students move between Me gusta on one side of the room and No me gusta on the other (somewhere in the middle is más o menos.) 

3. Where is my ____? game

This one is great for tons of repitition. I hide something either for real using flashcards and a prop, on jamboard, or just think of place in my mind. Usually there is some story behind what we're looking for. In our supermarket unit, I have dropped my money in the store and I need to find it. In the family unit, we're looking for the family member who ate my donut. In the house unit we're looking for grandma. In the city unit my dog has run away and we're looking for her. 

Whatever we're practicing, I'll have students repeat after me and then they raise their hands and take turns guessing where it is by saying the different vocabulary words. So that everyone is practicing, we chant the word and I play it up before revealing if they are correct. It's high energy and kids love it. Once you've played it as a group several times then you can let students play in pairs to get even more practice. 

4. Rally Robin

This is a cooperative learning structure that gets you a lot of bang for your buck and it's so easy! Students just take turns using the new vocabulary in a sentence. For example, in our supermarket unit I would have students repeat the food names after me, then we would sing our food chant, and then they would turn to one another and take turns saying Me gusta (a food here.) I have students point at themselves and then at their partner to show whose turn it is. 

5. Graphing

There are so many ways to have students graph! We graph our favorite animal, specials class, activity, food, etc. I like to print out worksheets with the graphs and put them in page protecters. Before we start I ask students to predict what they think the most popular will be in their class. This small addition to the activity has really upped the engagement and excitement because they want to know if they were right or not. Then I go around the room and everyone shares their answer. I fill in a large graph up on the board while students use a whiteboard marker to keep track on their own pages. 

What are your favorite ways to practice new vocabulary in your classes? Share in the comments below!

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