Conversation cards

Conversation cards 

There are several ways in which I use conversation / task cards in my room. 

1. Speed dating: It's simple! Just set up your seats in two rows where they face each other. I usually also post a timer on the smart board. 

With my novice students, I provide one row with conversation cards and the other side does not have any. 

The idea is that once the timer starts, students can start conversations based on that original question from the conversation card. These mini conversations will only take about a minute or so and therefore your novice students will enjoy it and be challenged enough! I have created this sample set of 20 questions that I use with my second semester students. They are meant to spark conversation with the topics we covered during first semester.   See the complete collection here. 

     

2. ¡A caminar! When students come in to the classroom you give each one a different conversation card. Once you do your morning routine, you get students "warmed up" by having them walk around and start short conversations with different students. In that conversation they must use their questions from the card. 

3. Written assessment. Each student receives an answer sheet. You give everyone one card to start with. They read the card and answer in complete sentences in the space provided. The teacher then walks around the room switching cards so that students have a chance of answering multiple questions. Set a timer and see how many they can answer. This can be done for 2-3 mornings as a warm up activity. On the last day you can collect and grade to give students feedback. I also go over all the cards as a group so we are all on the same page. 

Are there other ways in which you could use these cards in your classroom? 

Hope you can enjoy these ideas in your classroom.  

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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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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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La rutina diaria - Actividad de repaso

Today my students were reviewing for an upcoming test on daily routines. This includes reflexive verbs, telling time, and the use of adverbs. I found Kim's blog recently and subscribed. She shared this free download to practice time. I used it with a twist!!

Before students arrived, I taped one of Kim's cute little people to their desks.

Once class started, I got us started. 

First I told them what the time was in my card, and followed it with my daily routine at that time. 

For example: Son las 5:30 de la mañana. Los lunes me levanto lentamente a las cinco y media de la mañana. 

Then each student had to follow the time stamp! So after 5:30 am, came the 6 am. That student shared that at 6, they usually get ready: a las seis de la mañana mi hermano y yo nos arreglamos. 

This went on and on for about 10 minutes! The students enjoyed it and really got into it! 

This was a fun bell ringer that allowed us to put many concepts together and kept students engaged in the activity!

As a follow up, I used a download from El tarro de los Idiomas. This worksheet included in her download was the perfect way to get students to write about their routines at home.

Try it in your class and let me know how it goes!

Check out Kim's blog!

                        La hora

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Conjugation puzzles

Conjugation Fun

I am always looking for more fun and interactive ways to get students to really commit to memorizing vocab and conjugations. It is only after achieving this first step that we can really work on the rest of the fun activities I have planned for them knowing that there will be some focus on form. I also love tapping into their competitive spirit!

I found that short games are great bell ringers that get students in Spanish more and make it easier to transition into any of my follow up activities. They also hold the students accountable for knowing these items and practicing them often.

Using these conjugation puzzles, partners ask each other the conjugations of the common verbs that our unit uses. Only after both agree on the conjugation can they lay the piece down on the puzzle.

The puzzle on the picture is a free one I found online. It is a simple rectangle with AR verbs.

I created a few more challenging ones for my early finishers that were customized to our particular unit. Check them out here

Mission conjugation: NOT impossible!

We all dislike them but we all admit that, at some point in the process of acquisition, we have to see if students are using a particular tense correctly.

There are many ways to present students the idea of conjugation drills. I often try to tap into their competitive spirit, and therefore include many games into our daily "warm up" activities.

At the beginning stages of a chapter, students are still trying to commit the new vocab and new conjugations to memory. In an effort to put them on the spot and perhaps encourage them to study a bit more every night, I introduced my conjugation scrabble.

There are few rules to this game and therefore set up is easy and playing it is even easier!

In the TL, I share some of the key phrases that they will use in their game: "Palabras con amigos". This is my classroom version of the popular app "Words with friends". At some point in their lives they have actually played the original scrabble, done a crossword, or even used the app themselves. Therefore the details on how to actually play the game go smoothly.

Phrases like "my turn", "how do you spell", "who is the subject", "that is not correct" are all phrases that they must incorporate in their interactions while playing the game. The ultimate goal is for them to have some basic conversation while practicing their new conjugations.

The game went well! Students got into it! When time ran out (I set a timer to prevent it from going too long and therefore having students stop using the TL) students had to take their notes out and revise their spellings. The student who had the most words was the winner. Any spelling mistakes counted the verb as wrong. Winners enjoyed a small treat!

The next day we had a different activity and everyone seemed to have gone home and reviewed. So, in my eyes, Mission conjugation:Accomplished.

Emotions, descriptions and exit tickets

Exit tickets

After a long maternity leave and a wonderful summer, I am back at school and excited for a new school year at a new school! For a few months now I really wanted to try and incorporate exit tickets in my classroom so reviewing emotions, adjectives and gender and number agreement was the perfect way to use them.

My current level 2 students have had different instructors at level 1. Therefore I wanted to see how much review we needed to do in order to get us all on the same page with regards to the topics mentioned above.

Students were asked to answer the following questions:
1. ¿Cómo te llamas? What is your name
2. ¿Cómo eres? How are you? -- Describe yourself
3. ¿Cómo estás? How are you? -- How are you feeling

Three quick answers and LOTS of information easily gathered with this custom made "friends".  Now that the students have been introduced to this assessment tool, I know I will be using them more often.

**Also, after gathering the information I needed, these were displayed on the door for them to see other people´s answers and drawings!**

How do you use exit tickets?

Comecocos

Paper fortune tellers? Cootie catchers?
In Spanish, we call them Comecocos (coconut eaters), and 4th grade created their own in order to practice orally their interviewing skills. This project helped us put together various topics we had been working with for several months. It was a great review game as well as a great game to get us talking more in Spanish!
They asked each other questions like 
1. ¿Cómo te llamas? (what is your name?)
2. ¿Cómo estás? (how are you?)
3. ¿Cuál es tu color favorito? (what is your favorite color?)
4. ¿Cuál es tu fruta favorita? (What is your favorite food?)
5. ¿Cuántos años tienes? (how old are you?)

DOWNLOAD MY COMECOCOS HERE

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