Pets, pets, pets

I'm in my fifth year teaching and I'm finally at a point where I am repeating units that I've taught before but I don't know if I'll ever stop refining them. Take my Lost Pet unit, which my third graders loved last year. This year I'm teaching it to 5th grade but my fifth graders are going even further.

I still want them to describe their pets but I also wanted to focus on the verbs "I have" and "I want." So we started with playing my go to card game where students practice asking and answering questions over and over - The Crazy Pet game. Students ask ¿Tienes una mascota? Their partner flips over a card and answers. They keep playing until someone discards the Tengo un dinosaurio card. While half the class played the game, the other half got on the computer to play Victoria Languages Online. They also loved the ¿Tienes una mascota? song from this site.

Click the picture to purchase your own set of Crazy Pet cards and adoption questionnaire!

Once we had"I have" down we started on "I want". We started by looking at pet adoption sites (Yay for authentic resources!) and talking in a group about which pets we wanted to adopt and why. I made an anchor chart or language ladder to help my novice high students not only talk about which animal they wanted but WHY they wanted to adopt that animal.

Then I set them free  on the adoption site with a pre-adoption questionnaire. The scenario was that they and their roommate were adopting a pet. They had to read the different pet profiles and decide between themselves which animal they wanted to adopt and fill out the application - an activity that included ALL 3 modes of communication. I told them they were only allowed to adopt 1 pet and encouraged arguing as long as it was in Spanish. My one class really took that to heart and I heard lots of "No quiero un gato. Quiero un perro." Or "No me gusta grande."

If you teach fifth graders you know they get awful after Christmas break and that's especially true the closer you get to the end of the year but they have loved this unit and wanted to "adopt" pets more than one time. It was the perfect activity for the week right before spring break when everyone is restless. 

How do you teach pets? Share in the comments below!



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