Vocabulary Charades: Quick & Easy with Quizlet

Charades is a great way for students to review vocabulary in the target language while building classroom community. My secret for making it awesome while preserving prep time? Quizlet!

Step 1: Assemble your list of words. I like to throw in some challenge words that may not seem immedaitely pantomime-able (“It’s 2:10” and “apple” were ones that surprised my kids, but they eventually figured out how to act out). Maybe you already have it in Quizlet, or maybe you want to type it in a Word document and import it as a new Quizlet. Or maybe you just want to use mine? Here ya go:

Realidades Para Empezar Pantomime-able vocab

Realidades 1A Pantomime-able Vocab

 

Step 2: Print as flashcards. I’ve written before about why I love Quizlet, and the printing feature is a big reason! Print your words on the large or small flashcards. Check the two sided box so it prints the Spanish all on one page, but if you don’t want the English on the back, just adjust your printer to print one sided and skip the even numbered pages.

Step 3: Cut out your flashcards, or have a student do it for you. Assemble into baggies. Add directions, if you like. charades instructions (word)

Baggies are great for storing, while the buckets are great while students are playing – draw from one bucket and discard to the other.

 

Step 4: Divide your students into groups and play! Three groups of 8-10 players worked well with my students. 

Need some ideas for gestures to use? Here’s a video:

 

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Explora Español – Choice Board Language Exploration Stations for Spanish 1

Last year I implemented portfolios in Honors Spanish 1, with choiceboard exploration activities as a major component. I’m back at it again with a fresh batch of students, with my ideas from last year ironed out and refined. Here’s what we did:

Choiceboard instructions – PDF — WORD

 

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Option 1 – Magnetic Poetry – play with the words

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Last year, I kept my magnets on my mini fridge all year. It was awkward because students had to sit on the floor for the activity, and my magnets got bumped off the fridge all year. The overhead cart may not be pretty, but it worked great for this activity!

Option 2 – Spelling – play with the letters

Option 3 – Lyrics Training – play with music & lyrics

For lyrics training, students had a choice between La Gozadera (really difficult!) and Tengo tu love. Unfortunately, Tengo tu love was blocked by the school filter, so La Gozadera was their only option. Here are some of their reflections:

I found it very difficult to find the lyrics to the song. They speak very fast, and you have to listen very carefully in order to catch it. However, I found it as a good brain workout, and it became much easier at the end.

After doing the lyrics training, I started to make connections in my head. I was able to distinguish between Spanish words more easily and hear words at a faster rate than before. After making several attempts, I noticed patterns and picked up the pronunciation of specific words. I definitely would like to do this with different songs.

Option 4 – Book browsing – read the books

I have a pretty good selection of easy readers & children’s books in my classroom library. Even though I tell them the novels will be easier, they always gravitate toward the children’s books! Here’s a reflection:

The title of the book I chose is called, “Oh no! It’s Hippo!” The short story I read was about a hippo, who was made fun of because he was fat. The other animals in the jungle make fun of him, and scare him away from the pond. I learned that ‘hipo’ in Spanish means hippo, and hiccup. This activity was hard, because I had to translate what the book said. This was a valuable learning activity for me, because I learned a lot of new words. My goal going forward is to comprehend a page in the book.

 

Reflection

After the activities, I have students take a picture or screen shot a write a reflection on their learning and their language goals. I really enjoy reading these! We repeat these activities a couple times a semester, and it’s so exciting to see how much they grow over the course of the class. Especially in honors, I want to empower students to use Spanish for enjoyment, and not just see it as something they are doing for a grade. I think these activities also support state standards – Students will identify situations and resources in which target language skills and cultural knowledge may be applied beyond the classroom setting, for recreational, educational, and occupational purposes. (MLI.CC5) – As well as ACTFL standards – Students show evidence of becoming life-long learners by using the language for personal enjoyment and enrichment. 

#AuthresAugust

Hello, and welcome back to school! Today I want to share an activity I made today for my Spanish 1 students based on a video from one of my favorite sites for authentic Spanish audio, http://www.laits.utexas.edu/spe/index.html.

This is José M. Isn’t he precious?

I like this video because the content fits with my first unit of Spanish 1 and José M. speaks clearly and relatively slowly. But what to do with it? Here’s what I came up with:

Follow along as you listen, and correct the errors. After printing, I numbered the lines and students have this follow up task:

Simple, quick, comprehensible. Here is the link to José’s video and here is the activity, if you would like to use it.

 

Previous #Authres Posts:

• Authentic Audio: Physical Descriptions

• ¿Con quién se queda el perro?

• Reading Instruction in the TL: Menú Vips

• 10 Ways to Use a Song in Spanish Class

• Family Unit Audio Resources

• Weather Report Walk About

• Authentic Resources: Food

• Authentic audio: Mis clases

• Authentic Audio: Me gusta/No me gusta

• Audio Resources for my Greetings Unit

First Week of School: I love everything!

• I love my new classroom.
• I love block schedule!
• I love these lesson plans.
• I love this penguin one of my advisement students drew for me:

Reviewing our basic phrases with Bob and Squishy. I LOVE Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell’s “First Unit of Spanish 1” unit plans! I have to follow our department’s curriculum but her lesson plans let me start off the year with a comprehensible input BANG while still satisfying the department requirements.

• Also, I love those speech bubbles. Spent waaaaay too much time getting them, the textboxes, and the animation perfect! Here’s the presentation, the template is on page 7.
• I love stations! I repeated these station lesson plans from last year…so much easier this time around! Also easier with my new classroom and having space to organize materials!

Basic “to-do” list on board, asterisks for what requires something to be written down, and a note on where to find instructions for each task.

• I love having clothespins hot glued all over my walls:

Grab a bag & take it back to your desks.

• I love seeing my kiddos playing with the blocks AND following the instructions!

I set a time limit on the blocks station… it worked well this year. Had issues last year with kids complaining about not getting the blocks because one group hogged them.

• I love that I saved my example paragraph from last year, and COULD FIND IT when I needed it! Also, I love that I had all the instructions typed up and could actually find them on my computer! Hooray organization!
  
• I love the enthusiasm of brand new Spanish 1 students! And I LOVE hearing them practice with each other!

I love how organized I am the first week of school…even had a box with extra handouts for the week on the shelf below.

• I love my Spanish books. And I LOVE seeing my students look through them!

Switched gears after 1st period and bagged up books in gallon zip locks for Spanish 2 to use in a cognate lesson.

• I don’t love reviewing grammar in Spanish 2…but I loved doing conjugation practice in a walk-about with these prompts posted on the walls!

Rules: 1. Write a verb in the correct form that makes sense in the sentence. 2. Don’t repeat any verb another student has already written. 3. Be creative! Be wordy! Be FUNNY!

And I love that my department head bought me all this beautiful construction paper!

• And last of all…I love the honeymoon phase. Happy back-to-school, y’all.

Teaching Time With Picture Cards

One of my favorite resources for almost any unit is a set of picture cards for vocab words. Today I was teaching time,  so I gave students this handout:

 

You can make prettier ones here (digital or analogue clocks! five minute intervals! quarter hour intervals! thirty minute intervals! customize the clock face!), but I couldn’t easily get the combination of numbers I wanted, so I just typed the what I wanted into a chart in Word (still trying to think of a way to use the pretty ones though!) .  Download for free here.

So, step 1: input! After briefly introducing vocabulary, (Son las ___, y cuarto, y media), I started calling out times and having them point to the corresponding clock on their picture sheet. Note: the order of the clocks is deliberate! Since time is new to them (and in the past it’s taken my students a looooong time to be able to tell me what time it is!), I wanted to get lots of reps of the most important phrases – Son las ____, es la una, y cuarto, y media. I started with just the clocks on the first row, and gradually started calling out times on the subsequent rows as their confidence increased. You can also have them look at the clocks and repeat the vocab, or start it for them (Es la una…) and then let them finish (…y media)

Tip: Give directions in the target language! I say indica or toca and exaggeratedly mime pointing at my paper. If they don’t get it, I clarify with a word or two of English.

Step 2: Practice! Picture cards lend themselves quite well to matching. Matching activities are great because they feel like a game, they get students to read (without them realizing it’s a reading activity), and they give my fidgety teenagers a hands-on way to practice. Furthermore, it’s a student-centered way of giving input (so much CI is teacher-centered!), and when you match Spanish to pictures, there’s no English! Here’s what it looked like:

 

 

I made a class set of the “words” handout (download it here), and two class sets of the “numbers” handout – one to keep whole for the first half of class point-at-what-I-say activity, and one to cut apart for the matching activity.  I like to print the cut-apart cards on a different color paper – it makes them “pop” during the matching activity, and it helps to find them when they fall on the floor (Side note: one of my students couldn’t find the match for “Son las cinco.” So he called me over and told me, “Hey, Señorita, I’m missing one – there’s a five o’clock somewhere!”).

Tip: Keep your workload manageable – don’t try to cut thirty sets of cards yourself! My first period takes a couple of minutes to cut the cards apart, then clips each set together at the end of class. We throw them in a plastic bag, and a student walks around and collects the sets at the end of the activity.

 

Step 3: Practice some more! I asked them to hold up one of the pink cards for their partner, and have them tell what time it is. They have the white handout right there with the answers for support, so they can look at it to give their answer, or just use it to check each other.

More activities:

Lo tengo: A listening comprehension game. Divide students into groups, give each group a set of the picture cards (the clocks in this case), and have them split up the cards among them. Call out a word in the TL (or a definition or description in the TL), and each group races to be the first to find the corresponding card and yell Lo tengo!   More detailed instructions here!

Bingo? As soon as my students saw the cards they started begging me to play bingo. I haven’t yet found a program to take my vocabulary words or pictures and randomize them into 30+ unique bingo cards. Any ideas? All I can think of is having students cut apart the pictures and tape or glue them into custom bingo boards – is there a way to do that electronically? Free, preferably?

That’s all I’ve got – what else do you do with vocabulary picture cards? Quite a bit of prep goes into making the cards, so I like to get as many uses out of them as possible. Share, share share in the comments!

More Practice with Questions

As I was wrapping up stations last Friday, I asked students to respond to two reflection questions. What activities in class are most helpful for you? Are there any specific topics you need more practice with? The responses were for the most part encouraging and informative:

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Lots of students mentioned more practice with numbers, dates, and asking questions. Of those three topics, asking and answering questions is the one I most value. I also got lots of requests for more English and translation (natural student instinct, or am I not being comprehensible enough? Something for me to reflect on). So, for today, I put together an activity for practicing questions similar to one I tried last spring, inspired by a post by Colleen Lee over at Language Sensei. I give students some English support (which makes them happy), but it’s primarily in the TL, which makes me happy. Here’s the run-down:

Goal:

1. Solidify student comprehension of basic introductory questions.

2. Provide novel-feeling practice opportunities with introductory questions.

Flashcards – 1 set of questions in Spanish, 1 set of questions in English, 1 set of responses in Spanish, preferably printed on different colored paper. I printed mine from Quizlet, but you could easily create cards in Word or Excel.

Make enough copies for a set between every pair of students, plus a few extra for students who prefer to work alone. To cut down on prep, I had my first period cut the flashcards. At the end of the period each set was clipped together with a paperclip, and then thrown in a big zip-lock bag.

Procedure:

1. Give each pair of students a set of flashcards. Have them match the question in Spanish to the translation in English, and then the response in Spanish. I walk around and answer questions if they need help, but they can do this pretty independently.

Phase 1: Matching. I only had 2 colors of paper – would have liked to color-code the responses as well!

2. When they finish, I have them pull out the English, and start practicing asking and answering the questions out loud. Here’s where it gets fun: I put instructions on the board for multiple ways to practice, with the difficulty increasing as students moved down the list. Voilà differentiation! If they need more support, they can look at the cards as their partner asks the question, and use the “answer cards” as cues. If they want a challenge, they can practice without looking at the question as their partner asks, relying only on their listening comprehension skills. I told them to work at whatever level was right for them, but I’ve found that many of my kids this year are quite competitive and like to challenge themselves – so they’ll go for the hardest level!

#4 was a student’s idea 🙂

3. Go over it as a class. This gives me a rough gauge of student progress, and also gets in a couple more repetitions of the questions with proper pronunciation. I used Quizlet (rather than reading the questions myself – I love how Quizlet will read the questions out loud and shuffle the cards for me!), and went through the questions 3 times. The first time through, I had students translate the questions. The second time through, I asked them to respond in Spanish (everyone at once!). Third, I turned off the board (no visual support) and ran through the flashcards with only the audio, with students again responding in Spanish.

I plan to use this activity a few more times this week (though not spending as much time on it as I did today). Hoping to get all my students to at least level 3!

Stations: Practice and perfect!

I was talking to a few teachers in my department between classes earlier this week:

“I’ve introduced most of the unit’s vocab, but I need more ways to practice it. Students can do all right on straight translation, or remember a phrase long enough to do their stamps, but when I ask them a question out loud, they still can’t tell the difference between ¿Cómo estás? and ¿Cómo te llamas? How do I get them to keep practicing, without it being repetitious?”

How indeed, to get lots of repetitions without it getting old? STATIONS.

Here’s what I put together to practice basic beginning-of-Spanish-1 questions, numbers and letters, as well as letting them explore the language a little bit.

1. Conversation station: practice asking and answering questions out loud with a partner.

My classes are around 32 students each, so I make multiple sets of station supplies to give students the maximum number of options in choosing a station – I don’t want “but there’s nothing left to do!” or, “all the stations I need are taken!” to ever be an excuse. I printed the questions out on cardstock, and plan to save and add to these bags throughout the year. This station WILL be recycled!

2 . Numbers station: I bought these knock-off Jenga blocks from the Dollar General for $3 a few years ago. I wrote the numbers on them in a sharpie, from 1-42. Lots of teachers give students a task to correspond to a specific number, but today I just asked them to put the blocks in order.

 3. Reading station: I’ve been acquiring Spanish children’s books slowly over the past few years. I have pure Spanish children’s books, an Autobus Mágico, some bilingual books (some collected for me by my friend’s mom from Cheerio boxes), plus some “First 100 words in Spanish” type picture-dictionary books. I also have some novels, some poetry, a Bible, and a set of picture flashcards. This station was just for students to explore Spanish independently, from a book that looked interesting to them. For accountability, I asked them to write down five words they learned – either from looking at the English translation, looking at the picture, looking them up in a dictionary, or by recognizing a cognate.

In one period I caught two boys going through the flashcards – Guess what bicicleta means?? Ok, coche? Avión? #ReasonNumber287WhyILoveTeachingNovices

4. Spelling station: a good friend of mine gave me a Spanish Scrabble game (Pensante!) a few years ago. I divided the tiles into 4 baggies (about 25 tiles per bag – so multiple groups could participate at once), and asked students to first look at the tiles and review the alphabet (they need to be able to spell their name for their stamps). Then, they can arrange the letters into as many Spanish words as possible (they wrote them on their paper for accountability), and add up their points. They got really into this one! Also, isn’t it amazing how many words they know after just 2 weeks of class? 5. Tech stations: review vocabulary on Quizlet on smartphone, on my Promethean board, or on my desktop computer. They love the scatter game, and they can plug their headphones in and listen to the pronunciation.

6. Writing station: write a few sentences in Spanish about yourself telling your name, age, birthday, where you’re from, plus any bonus information you know how to say! I posted an example paragraph about myself on the board for extra reading input.

7. Stamps station: This is straight from the fabulous Jefferson County World Language Curriculum playbook. I gave them a set of speaking goals at the beginning of the unit, written as I can statements – I can introduce myself. I can ask someone their age. I can tell the date. As they learn how to do each goal, they do it for me out loud and I stamp their sheet. I LOVE the stamp sheets, but honestly, it’s difficult to balance listening to students individually while managing/teaching the other 31 students. Except on station day! I wrote up VERY CLEAR instructions for each station, posted around the room, and tried to be explicit about my expectations up front, so that students could manage their learning independently. If the rest of my students are occupied in learning tasks that don’t require my direct supervision, I’m free to focus on individual students, listen to their stamps, and give individual help and feedback. Differentiation success!

Links:

My stations instructions – don’t reinvent the wheel! I posted these around the room, and made multiple copies so students could take the instructions back to their work area. I also included suggested group size and how long to spend at each station, but I didn’t end up supervising this too closely – if they are engaged in language-learning activities and behaving appropriately, I am happy! Also, I might have taped the “Stamps Station” sign to my shirt… just sayin’ 🙂

More stations resources – the generous sharing of other language teachers has helped me so much in learning how to implement and manage stations! Here are some of the posts that have helped me:

The Creative Language Class has a pretty comprehensive series on stations (and have lots of other great ideas too!), so if you’re just getting started I would recommend starting by reading through their posts.

http://creativelanguageclass.com/stations-centers/

Kristy Placido on stations:
http://kplacido.com/2013/10/02/stations/

http://kplacido.com/2013/10/03/stations-what-ill-do-next-time/

http://kplacido.com/2013/10/05/future-ideas-for-stations/

Stations in Spanish 3 and AP:
http://musicuentos.com/2012/09/success-with-stations/

http://musicuentos.com/2013/09/music-stations/

More on stations…
http://candidagould.wordpress.com/2014/03/02/station-pedagogy-or-the-magic-roundabout/

Audio Resources for my Greetings Unit

Today I want to share two authentic-ish audio resources, as well as activities I’ve put together to go with them. I’m using them in the second week of Spanish 1, as part as the introductory unit covering greetings and leave takings, personal information, numbers, and dates.

The first listening activity is one I made last year, and found last week as I looked through my unit 1 files – hooray for files being organized enough to find things, and hooray for year three of proficiency-based teaching, and having teaching files worth reviewing! Anyway, here is the activity (updated link – PDF formatted 2 per page), and or you find it here in an editable format, with the direct audio links. The audio is from Audio Lingua, and features speakers from Mexico, Spain, and Paraguay. If the audio links don’t work, trying searching the speaker’s name on Audio Lingua, and you should find a “Me presento” file. Each recording includes different information, but it gives students a chance to hear native speakers introduce themselves, tell where they are from, tell their age, and their birthdays.

The second listening activity I have for you today is based on a video from Spanish Proficiency Exercises.   In it, a Mexican woman describes the rules on when cars are allowed to drive inside Mexico City – basically, due to high air pollution, everyone is banned from driving one day a week based on the last number of their license plate*. So I like this audio for reinforcing days of the week and number vocabulary, and again for exposing students to native accents and rhythm of language, but I LOVE the culture in it!  I made a cloze activity for it (there is a Spanish and English transcript for each video, so clozes are super-easy to make!). I will probably ask students to skim for cognates before we listen to it, and underline the days of the week, then afterwards discuss in Spanish (because Martina Bex taught me to do a pre- and post- activity for every authentic resource!) – ¿En Atlanta, hay problemas con el tráfico? ¿La solución de México es buena o mala? I’ll keep the discussion simple, because it’s the second week of Spanish 1, but it will still be in the TL! Here is the activity, with a link to the audio at the top.  Irma C. is the last video at the bottom of the page. Enjoy! What authentic audio do you use with your novices?

*My Mexican friend told me the law has been tightened since Irma C. recorded this video – now cars that are more than ten years old are also prohibited from driving on Saturdays.