FIFA World Cup 2022 Resources

Who’s excited for the world cup? Me!!!! I´ve been working on a unit for my 6th and 7th grade connections classes with a mix of learning targets for language use in Spanish and cultural understandings in English. I hope you can find something useful!

Lesson plans: lesson plans.docx

Slides: Click here

Song Worksheets:

Vamos a Qatar

Ulayeh

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School Unit Videos

The school unit in Spanish 1 offers tons of opportunities for incorporating culture and making cultural comparisons. I made a playlist of videos around the topic of school that I’ve been using with my Spanish 1 students. Here’s some ideas for how you can use them:

1. Movie talk the What a Classroom Looks like, School Lunches, or School Uniforms videos. Ask simple questions: ¿Qué es esto? ¿Cuántos años tiene? ¿Quién es el profesor? ¿De qué color es? ¿Tienen mucho dinero o poco dinero?
2. Use as a warm up or closing activity. Watch and discuss what you see. Have students write down thoughts, or ask a guiding question before watching – what is simliar/what is different? What surprises you? What questions do you have?
3. Examine bias. This is a great cross-curricular connection. Who made this video? Why did they make it? Are they biased or neutral? Remind them that even if they spot bias, they can still learn something about life/school in that country.

I’m also loving the music video for “La Magia” by Little Jesus. Kara Jacobs shared a wealth of resources on her blog, including a story based on the music video. I recommend that you read the story before watching the video!

For more ideas for the school unit, here are all my school unit posts. What are your favorite school unit resources? What videos should I add to my playlist?

Teaching Mira Canion’s Tumba

This year is my third round teaching the novel Tumba in my Spanish 1 classes. You can see my previous post about Tumba here.

 

A few thoughts, now that I’ve taught the novel a few times:

• We read two chapters a day most days of this unit (a few days we don’t read at all). Students are interested in the story and seem motivated to keep reading after one chapter. I also teach on block schedule, so one chapter a day is too slow a pace for us.
• Some of my favorite activities with the book:
  • Quizlet live 
  • Kahoot
  • Using the chapter art from the teacher’s guide as a listening activity  – I read a sentence, they match it to a picture
  • Using the chapter art as a writing prompt – summarize the chapter, write a sentence for each picture, etc.
  • Listening to several versions of Cielito Lindo with this activity from Martina Bex. I also love this version with Pavarotti and Enrique Iglesias
  • Listening to Calaverita by Santa Cecilia
  • The Mexican Revolution readings in the teacher’s guide – I thought they would be too hard for my students, but they exceeded my expectations and did quite well!
  • Fill in the blank vocab and verb activities – I use these as chapter reviews more often than giving comprehension questions, usually on Schoology so I don’t have to grade them. Here is an example: 

This year we also did chapter skits as an assessment. It was my second time doing them, and to be honest, I’m not sure if the result is worth the class time it takes to prepare. One of my colleagues made a comment in passing last year that really challenged me: You can’t say you do differentiated instruction if you don’t have a single differentiated assessment. Ouch! I am guilty of hating projects and preferring to assess with paper and pencil tests. I decided this would be a good unit to assess differently. I don’t think this skit project is excellent differentiated instruction, but it’s what I was able to come up with this year. Next year, I need to clarify my goals before the unit begins and plan for an assessment that better aligns with that goal.

Disclaimers aside, if you want to try doing chapter skits, here are my instructions and here is my rubric. On performance day, I assigned each student a classmate to give positive feedback to. I asked them to write specific compliments about their performance – good pronunciation, good job remembering your lines, nice acting, etc. They wrote some really nice comments, and I think they enjoyed receiving them from their classmates. We also did “Tumba Oscars,” which was super fun. I wrote several categories on the board and students voted on slips of paper – best actor, best actress, best Spanish, most creative, funniest, best Sergio, best Alex…etc. I made certificates using a google slides template to surprise my winners with the next day.

Día de los Muertos Resources

With Fall Break coming up next week (hooray!) and homecoming week right after, I’m hitting Día de los Muertos early this year (also, invariably I see everyone’s wonderful Día de los Muertos lessons AFTER it’s already passed, so here ya go, folks – plenty of time to plan for your lessons!). Here’s what I’m doing:

Warm Up:

Comparing and contrasting products and practices of Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. No more, “Isn’t that Mexican Halloween?”

We brainstormed products and practices of Halloween, and wrote them on butcher-paper posters. I then put on some of the videos below, and asked them to look for the products and practices of Día de los Muertos.  Gracias Laura Sexton for the idea to approach it from the Products/Practices/Perspectives angle. 🙂

Videos

The Wild Thornberrys celebrateDía de los Muertos:

Travel Channel:

Catrina Make Up Tutorial:

I downloaded all the videos as FLVs with KeepVid and played them back to back with VLC media player – by downloading them I avoid internet connectivity issues and ensure that I’ll still have the videos if they’re later removed from Youtube. The Wild Thornberrys were actually pretty accurate, and held my students’ attention. The travel channel video is GREAT and short (though not quite as engaging as the Thornberrys), so if you’re on a tight schedule, go with that one. They also enjoyed the make up tutorial, and I showed them this picture of me from Halloween last year.

If you want to keep it all in the TL, you could movie talk this clip:

After the videos, we added the products and practices of Día de los Muertos to our poster. It’s a little messy, but here’s the result:

I’m going to follow up tomorrow with some reflection questions, or possibly class discussion on the perspectives reflected in each culture’s holiday products and practices.