Three Things I'm Loving in My Classroom Right Now

 I survived my first Valentine's Day in middle school! There was a lot of ccandy, a lot of presents, and a lot of drama but we made it through. Here are some things I'm loving right now!

💖 Interchangeable mini anchor charts

I only have so much room on my walls and I didn't have a good spot for my numbers this year so I made a desk mat instead. But I also wanted some interpersonal phrases that students could use to liven up their conversations. First quarter I had both taped down but they ended up so gross that I had to scrap that by October. Instead I used velcro and I can change them based on what we're doing in class that day. I'm currently working on making one for present tense verb endings. 

Want to make your own? I make them in Powerpoint but Google slides would also work. Resize under design or Page Setup to 8.5 x 11 and then insert a small square about 1/3 of the page. Put in any images and text you want. Then print, laminate and add a velcro dot. 

Fun Family Project for Spanish class!

 Are you looking for something beyond a family tree for your familia unit? How about a children's book? There are LOTS of real world examples you can look at before AND it's a perfect authentic task. 

Check out my last post to see which books (hello authentic resources!) I used with students before we created our own. They also had lots of practice with personality and physical descriptions during this unit.

This project was a summative assessment grade. I didn't want them using translators or AI so I gave them a paper graphic organizer for their children's books that they filled out in class, Chromebooks closed. This gave me a good idea of what they could really do with the language and it prevented me from giving them a grade based on how pretty they made their children's book. This is a language class, not a design class, so even though some students made some amazing looking books they might have only gotten a B based on their language. We are an IB school so I used an IB MYP Language Acquisition rubric but any proficiency based rubric would work for this project. 

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!)