I’m between chapters right now, teaching a mini-unit on weather, feelings, and location. My department needs for my students to know the verb estar (and eventually distinguish between ser and estar), so I’m working to contextualize the use of the verb before we look at the chart and talk about the forms.
I used this activity from Zachary Jones earlier in the week (he has a whole collection of weather activities here). It was a good review of geography, and gave students a few reps of the weather phrases. I followed up the next day with this activity (dropbox link to the word document).
I printed out the weather reports from espanol.weather.com, and posted them up around the room (I like to get students out of their seats!). I numbered them with sticky notes to make it clear to students what they needed to read, and typed up some questions for them to answer about each report. At the end, they answered a few questions comparing today’s weather with the 2013 report from the Zachary Jone’s activity, plus a few more questions about the weather. Students walked around to each report, answered the questions, then moved to the next one.
I posted two complete sets (labeled in different colors) to make sure enough readings were available for my classes of 32. Students could do the readings in any order.Reflection
All of my kids know hace sol, hace frío, and hace calor, but nieva and hace viento are taking longer to acquire. I was pleased that the questions guided them through reading the #authres weather reports, and also got in more reps of those phrases. I was also pleased with the energy that so much movement generates (although some students chose to take pictures of the readings and return to their seats to answer the question – whatever makes them comfortable). I had gone over Celsius to Fahrenheit conversion the day before with the Zachary Jones activity, giving them both the exact formula, as well as a short-cut “close enough” formula one of my college professors taught me – double it and add 30. I invited my administrator to come observe me during this lesson, and he was very impressed at the students doing the conversion in their heads!
Ms. Brown Spanish 
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