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!
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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!)
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 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 - 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!
