¡No soy un pavo!

November and the cold weather have arrived, and with it so has the excitement for Thanksgiving break. Well, whether you celebrate this holiday or not, the ¡No soy un pavo! activity will surely entertain and engage your students.

I have used this activity with students ranging 4th grade up to my collegiate and adult learners. All you have to do is modify the prompts to their level of proficiency, but all levels showed great excitement and overall engagement. 

The main point in this activity is for students to create a disguise so that their turkey can be spared from becoming this holiday's dinner. Students can color, use fabric, crafting materials, OR, with my older students they can even explore digital options of their choice.  

Once they have completed the disguise portion, it is time to create a story for this unique guest at their Thanksgiving dinner table. In this new identity, students can (according to their proficiency level)

- Give the turkey a new name

- Give them a place of origin (ser)

- Describe their guest (ser + adjectives)

- Places where they go (ir + a) and what to do (ir + a + verb, and different tenses)

Your beginner students, for example, can simply share the basic information. My intermediate students are asked to include adjectives to describe their personality (ser + adjectives) as well as including likes and dislikes (gustar).  My intermediate high students are expected to also include a rough set of activities this guest enjoys doing during the week (ir + a) and other things they do (present tense). 

For my college students, depending on the semester that I am teaching, options range from preterit and imperfect story telling to subjunctive suggestions this guest shares in order to have the best thanksgiving ever !!! This has also turned into an essay prompt, yielding entertaining submissions.

Students can also be asked to present to the class depending on your time availability. My college students, for example, due to the class of classroom time, are asked to create a Flipgrid submission.

During the new year return, these projects become a great way to review the material previously covered by converting them into a game of guess who! Simply display these around the room or create a Google Slides presentation and have students read descriptions printed and thrown in a hat! It truly is one of my students favorite way to review material. 

You could also type the descriptions with some grammatical errors and asked students to correct them.

I hope your students enjoy this resource as much as mine have done through the years. 

Thanks for reading. 

Profe Botero-Moriarty

Here is the link to the resource.  It comes in English and Spanish to accommodate any and all classrooms.

Do not forget to leave some feedback on the TpT purchases to earn some credit towards your next purchase. 

And follow me there too to stay up to date with new product releases!

 

 

Some other fun examples

 

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Mi casa

La casa

Talking about different homes and different styles based on geography has always been exciting to me. When the unit of La casa approaches my classroom, I try to do new and different things that engage my students in different ways.

As a creative person, I encourage my students to experience language through crafts, colors and more! I try to bring different options to accommodate those less creative and there is always a more open ended approach that my most creative students can take and go wild!

In the past, I have used homes to address cultural topics like Cinco de Mayo. You can read that here.

This time around, I wanted to students to see the value of pictures as a mean to familiarize themselves with new vocabulary. We often doodle and create connections in that manner, so I had high hopes for this manipulative.

Visuals are super important for our young learners, but never underestimate the power of a "cute" handout when you teach older students (high school and college). These simple activities in those age groups can really spark wonderful conversations in the target language.

This week, we are starting a unit on houses: rooms, furniture, accessories, etc. We are also working hard on spatial descriptions and physical ones as well. Students usually resort to copying their vocab on their notes or Quizlet. Enter @FunforSpanishTeachers' lovely resource. My students loved labelling it, coloring it and just getting creative with it.

The second day after it has been labelled and customized, my students will walk the classroom and chat with different partners about their unique homes. They will talk about what rooms they can find in the home, what furniture, accessories, etc. They will review how to create descriptions and be able to share details of their particular homes.

¿Cuántos cuartos tienes?

¿Cuál es tu cuarto favorito y por qué?

¿Cómo es tu sala?

¿De qué color es el sofá en tu casa?

But this is just the beginning!!!

Another approach for our more novice learners is to come up with sample questions as a group, have them displayed or written on the board along with some sample answers. This will build the student's confidence and serve as a resource for when they may feel stuck. You more proficient students will not need the help, but it will make a huge difference to those who may struggle a bit.

Stay tuned for more house resources and ideas.

I have no business relationship with Fun For Spanish Teachers. I just bought this resource and loved it so much I wanted to share. 
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/La-Casa-House-Interactive-Notebook-3702194

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Más y más libros en español

 ¡ Libros, libros y MÁS libros!

On my first post about books, I shared lots of links to access read aloud stories. Check it out HERE. Then I shared with you how much I am loving Hoopla to access even MORE books using my public library card. Click HERE to read that post. 

Today, I wanted to share my newest "trick" to add more Spanish books to my personal connection.  I asked my kids' grandparents to skip the candy this year and just send me some $ to order books. This particular order is set to be delivered before Halloween so it is PERFECT! This way, my kiddos get new books AND I get new material for my students. 

I am not affiliated with Scholastic, but this month they have some great deals on packs of Spanish books. Even if you miss these deals, I wanted to share the titles that I found in case you like them too!

I hope these help you grow your library! 

**Remember to send parents your wish list**

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Read aloud Spanish books

Where do you find Spanish books for your kids and students?

I hate buying a ton of books because my own children just read too many! So I want to share something I have been doing.

Hoopla is a free app and website that links to your library card. On the search bar I simply put SPANISH and then usually it suggest Spanish Children. When I click there I get a GIANT list of options.

https://www.hoopladigital.com/. You can click on the ❤️ and create a list of favorites that you can borrow as you go. 

So, how do I know what books are appropriate for each of my kids and students?

If your school works with AR levels, then the Renaissance website will become your BFF!!!! I just search the title, and BOOM! I know the level!

https://www.arbookfind.com/UserType.aspx?RedirectURL=%2fdefault.aspx

I click on Parent, and then I am able to search for pretty much everything! Depending on my student's proficiency levels, I also challenge them to take the AR comprehension tests in Spanish.

I hope this is helpful to you, your own children and students. I know having the app be free allows you to share titles for the parents to pick from and use during virtual learning.

**I am not affiliated to either one, just sharing what has worked for me, my children and my students during this difficult time adjusting to virtual learning. **

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En mi casa....

Hogar dulce hogar

A home is more than a house. That is why every retail store these days is filled with inspirational quotes to hang around the house. With this idea in mind, I decided to have my students take a closer look at their families and use the affirmative tú commands to create some art. Here are the steps we followed.

Step 1: The idea was for them to decide what were some of the important things that were important to their families. I love lettering and do it as a hobby. Well, life gets busy and projects get set aside. So, when a workshop opened up with Lettering Works, I jumped at the opportunity!

 

The end result was cute and I made it a big poster to decorate my classroom. It also allowed us to talk about each of the commands I used and why those were important to MY family. 
 

Step 2: Students were given some time to brainstorm. Some fun music in the background for inspiration helped! We also embraced #throwbackThursday, left technology aside, and dusted off some paper dictionaries.

Step 3: I shared with them some examples and ideas that they could create. I made an example by just writing my commands with different fonts and then coloring them to give it some life.

This one is from Chelsie, the artist who hosted the workshop and the inspiration for mine. Click on the image to check out more of her work. 

A few months after, the semester wrapped up and I made them a little notecard thanking them all for lettering with me. I love it and it brings me joy, so I wanted them to find a different artistic outlet. 

This is the one I made later on:

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Spanish books

If I wasn't a teacher I would...

Who am I kidding? I have always liked teaching, even when I was on my way to go to med school! I always led our study groups ;D

However, during this time at home, I have envied my friends with office jobs who now get to sit at home with lots of FREE time. All their posts of books, and book clubs and books and more books! How I wish I had time to read more BOOKS!   Ok. Pitty party is O V E R!

My children have been having a BLAST reading SO MANY BOOKS! The days leading to our school closure, a couple of my co workers were very kind and let my children raid their classroom libraries so our stash of "new" books is pretty fantastic!

Also, I am thankful that I did not give their kids all their book fair books all at once! They have been able to get these now one at a time!!!

So all these books have been great for my older kids, but my youngest (4yo) constantly needs ME to read to her. If you, like me, just don't have a million free hours to read with your little ones, then this post is for you.

This post is ALSO for you, if you are a teacher who wants to share more stories with your students.


Here are some awesome website with cute Spanish books and stories!

1.The Spanish Experiment:  https://www.thespanishexperiment.com/stories/chicken-little

2. Spanish Mama's simple and cute fable stories! https://spanishmama.com/fables-fabulas/

3. Spanish fairy tales from The fable cottage: https://www.thefablecottage.com/spanish

4. Astronauts reading space themed stories!! https://storytimefromspace.com/astronaut-annie-2/

5. Easy readers from Spanish Playground: https://www.spanishplayground.net/easy-spanish-books-pdf-kids/

6. Scholastic's books and activities. All very engaging and fun https://classroommagazines.scholastic.com/support/learnathome.html

7. For my college-aged students: https://classroommagazines.scholastic.com/support/learnathome.html

8. Read conmigo: Their free sample is cute so I may be singing up for an account to check out more books. https://www.readconmigo.org/library

9. Spanish leveled readers from Reading A-Z: https://www.readconmigo.org/library

10. YouTube finds https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfs5ju_X8bFbuTMgAFUjHQ3A0HAFgFu58

11. Maguaré. Stories and trabalenguas! https://maguare.gov.co/leer/


**I am NOT affiliated with any of these companies. I have simply found their materials are well done and helpful for my kids and students**


Have you found other super awesome resources? Share them in the comments!

❤️Andrea

   

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Guided drawings

Guided drawings

My children LOVE  to draw, color and create stories from drawings. During this time, I have found some incredible tutorials to keep us entertained. 

I have also started creating some for my students in order to make sure that we have fun, keep them creative, but also reinforce some of the concepts we had been learning in class these last few months. 

Check them out here on my YouTube channel. If you find them helpful, share the link in your lessons! 

**I am not good at drawing, so my examples are simple and doable by my 4th-8th graders and even my college students! There is no excuse for them not to have fun!**

These are the originals:

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Versus the wonderful submissions from some of my students:

 

   

Since my own kids know all my "party tricks", I did some digging and found some awesome, talented artists that could help us out. Here are some of our family favorite:

- Doodles with Mo Willems: The incredible creator of my Kinder's fave Piggy and Gerald has taught us SO much about the art of drawing. Enjoy his tutorials HERE.  He even taught us to make some cute animations and inspired us to have dinner and doodles

- Spanish playground has a cute panda session HERE. 

- FUN and free printable guided drawings from one of my favorite clip artist on Teachers Pay Teachers: Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah. Check them out HERE.

- Cute Spanish videos on YouTube HERE.  

- The dude from the Underpants books!!!! Check it out HERE. 

Have you found OR created any doodling places that you love? Share them in the comments!

Stay inside everyone and let us get through this together!

❤️Andrea

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