Routine: Weather Warm Up Sheet

Here’s a routine I’ve been using to work with weather, feelings, and dates/days of the week words.  I gave each student a sheet like this, and each day we fill out a box:

My primary goal is to get continual reinforcement of weather and feelings words, and encourage a variety of responses to ¿Cómo estás?  I left a blank so they can personalize their responses, but included the choices to get them to keep reading over them to choose the appropriate responses for each.  It has also worked as a good review of days of the week. It’s a quick routine at the beginning of class, I’m speaking comprehensible language, and my students are giving me a variety of personalized responses.

If you want a copy, here are the Dropbox links, gender-specific so my girls will stop saying Estoy cansado!

Weather warm up -female version

Weather warm up- male version

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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.

 

 

 

 

Weather Report Walk About

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.

Weather reports on the board, numbered with purple post-its for visibility

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!