Speaking Practice for Weather & Feelings

Here is an activity I used to practice weather and feelings vocabulary, as well as asking and answering questions. Students set up their paper like this:

To get students to respond with a variety of feelings and weathers, I assigned them their responses:

I typed up a list, made a masculine and feminine version for the feelings, and printed on color-coded card stock.

Cut into strips and ready to be handed out

I gave my students the usual lecture about doing the activity in Spanish (ask and answer the questions in Spanish. If you do it in English or copy someone else’s you miss out on the practice and on the learning), and set them loose to start speaking. I circulated, participated, managed, encouraged, and corrected as needed.  They finished up with some summary sentences at the end.

Reflection

• Most of my classes did pretty well with staying in Spanish. I was quite pleased.
•  We’re working on the verb estar, so I included the question Where are you? to get in more reps. I liked that it gave me an excuse to recycle/review Spanish-speaking countries and capitals.
• Usually when I do activities like this my students personalize their answers (How old are you? Where are you from? What do you eat for breakfast?), but assigning responses worked well this time.  My kids seemed to acquire a few phrases, like frío, sol, feliz, and triste pretty quickly, but need more practice with other phrases. I also liked that their answer strip served as CI – gender-specific feelings, whole weather phrases, etc.
• I gave a vocabulary quiz today and I was pretty disappointed with the results.  Last year I used a daily warm up sheet where they circled a response to ¿Cómo estás? and ¿Qué tiempo hace?, and we went over it every day. I’m going to try that, and offer a re-take in a week or two.

If you want to use my files, here are the dropbox links:

Student response form (my classes ended up doing it on notebook paper – copy paper is running low)

Weather/feeling/location assignments

Weather warm up sheet – this is one I used last year, when I realized half my students couldn’t answer ¿Cómo estás? I’m going to tweak the answers a bit to encourage them to use a wider variety of responses.

 

 

 

 

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