La familia y las comparaciones

La familia real y los comparativos

Teachers sharing ideas is probably one of the things I enjoy the most. Whenever I am stuck thinking of creative ways to present a topic, these teachers come to my rescue. 

I wanted to change up a bit the way in which my students practiced the theme about family and comparisons. I have my usual activities that I love, but I wanted MORE!

Here is were those teachers came to my rescue and shared this video about the Spanish royal family. Check it out here. However, lately, I have been using EdPuzzle more often to create a more engaged conversation about the video with my students. So check out the EdPuzzle version of the video here. 

With the help of EdPuzzle, my students can I watch the video together and have a classroom discussion with every questions that pops up, OR I can assign the EdPuzzle video as a follow up homework assignment!

I have also created a paper version of the questions in the EdPuzzle link that you can download here for free. 

What types of activities are you using in your classroom to talk about families? how do you incorporate the comparatives grammar into this topic? I would love to hear about it. 

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El calendario Azteca

El calendario Azteca

¿Cuándo es tu cumpleaños?
¿Cuántos años tienes?
¿Cuáles son los días de la semana?
¿Qué te gusta hacer los martes?
¿Cuál es tu rutina diaria?

These are just some of the concepts that you can review using this cool idea. I found it many years ago and have used it to help my students improve their presentational skills!

Here is how it works:
1. In the outer ring, they will jot down the months of the year. They can use images that represent each month. I ask my students to make their birthday month stand out. 
2. The middle ring represents the days of the week. They can also represent each day with images about things they enjoy doing on those days. I ask them to make the day in which they were born stand out as well.  
         *Use this to review gustar, or to review reflexives and daily routines. 
3. The center can be used in different ways:  
         *The year in which they were born 
         *The current year with a drawing of who they are today. 

When the project is done, half of the students line up around the classroom and half of them will walk around. In a way, these students because "art pieces" in our live museum. This will allow half of the class to present to smaller groups. I have found that this is less intimidating for my shy students.
I set a timer, and when the timer goes off, the rolls reverse.

If you would like to try this in your classroom, download it here.

Did you try it in your classroom? I would love to read about it! Leave me a comment!!

Here are some of the examples from my classroom.

          

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Por y Para

Cabin fever anyone?

We have had some seriously cold days here in the midwest, which have kept me home! On these days, our school does online teaching days. The challenge is creating work that my students can do on their own. So I try to give them something simple that will get them to practice what we have been doing in class. This way, next time we see each other we can pick up where we left off.

Por and para was one of those topics I needed them to practice without me being there to facilitate examples.

I decided that they needed help organizing their notes, so here is a simple handout where they can start thinking of different scenarios in which to use por or para.  You can download them HERE


           

I have also found out that my students enjoy task cards that they can use to start conversations with others or that make them walk around the room seeking examples. Therefore, I gather many of the topics that we have been working with in the classroom and made example task cards! Check them out here.

Or try both of these together in my bundle.

How do you teach por and para in your classrooms?

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No more translating

"What's that word?....  I have on the tip of my tongue!"  As a multilingual, I find myself in that situation often, specially in front of my students. At that moment, I must describe the word I am looking for in order for them to help me figure out what its called.

So if this happens to me, it will surely happen to my students! This is when I was inspired by a popular game where one has to guess what is on the card (placed on one's fore heard) via the descriptions provided by their teammates.

At the time I decided to pilot this activity, my intermediate students where learning about direct and indirect object pronouns. I would love to say that I am textbook free, however my school is simply not there yet. So, what is one to do when teaching this complicated grammar topic to high schoolers while engaging them in the target language? Take them on a trip!

Every student was going to get "ready" to take a trip to an exotic Spanish-speaking country and therefore they had to prepare themselves. We took the vocab from the end of the chapter and in groups started creating detailed descriptions about them.

For example:

La maleta: La haces en tu casa. Lleva tu ropa en las vacaciones. La facturas en el aeropuerto. 

La playa: Puedes nadar en ella y tomar el sol. Tiene arena y puedes relajarte aquí. Está cerca del mar. 

El hotel: Tiene muchas habitaciones. Es donde duermes cuando estás de vacaciones. Tiene muchos huéspedes. 

When all our vocab had unique descriptions made, I created a quizlet to let students practice it at home, and to use it as a warm up activity (side note: my students are obsessed with quizlet live! Try it!)

At this point, the process of creating descriptions became second nature to them so it was time to challenge them with my circumlocution cards. Each one provides them with a prompt to use in their description. 

For example

Lo /la (s) usas para....     

Es necesario ... 

NOW WHAT??? Time to REALLY challenge them. I made copies of the task cards and I made copies of our vocabulary words. In teams, students would select a vocab word and the teammates would use different circumlocution cards to give them hints about the word the student had to guess.

    

This has become one of their preferred warm up activities. The best part is that now that they understand the expectations, I have been able to throw in new vocab and they have rose to the occasion of creating fascinating ways to describe these new terms. 

Give it a try by downloading it HERE. 

If you use it in your classroom, leave me a comment. Tell me how it went. Would you change anything? Add anything?

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