Reading Instruction in the TL: Menú Vips

 

My grad school course this semester is all about TL reading instruction. It’s fascinating! Our big project this semester is to put together a thematic unit with reading lessons for four different authentic resources. I finished my first lesson last week and I would like to share it with you all! For my first lesson, I decided to use the children’s menu from the Mexican restaurant chain Vips. You can find it here on their website, or here in PDF. I taught this lesson to my Spanish 1 students  after spending 2 days introducing food vocabulary. The activities include a gallery walk, two videos (to provide context for the restaurant), vocabulary activities, and currency conversion activities. It took me two 80 minute blocks to complete the whole sequence. I hope you (and my professor!) like it 🙂 I actually recorded my class on day 1, so if you are interested in seeing the video (I taught 90%+ in Spanish!), please send me an email and I’d be glad to share the video with you as well.

Lesson Plan

Student Activity Sheet

Authentic Resources: Food

I’m having lots of fun finding #authres for my food unit. They may not all make it into a lesson this year, but here are some of my favorites:

Commericals

Have you seen this google doc Sara-Elizabeth Cottrell started? It’s full of  links to Spanish-language commercials, with transcripts. I used it to put together this cloze activity for my classes: Food Commercials Clozes

Here are the videos I used:

M&Ms

Sancor Bebe 3

Burger King

McDonalds

Kara Jacobs also has a great collection of videos here.

Spanish Proficiency Exercises:

Oh, how I love this website! Here are the videos on the topic “Mi comida favorita.” We’re getting so much deeper than the textbook vocabulary, with cultural dishes – I can’t wait to talk about el picante de cuy with my students! Here is the activity I made to go with the videos: laits mi comida favorita

La Ogra – Gazpacho

Martina Bex brought this video to my attention last year. You can see the video and find an embedded reading activity here.  I used it in Spanish 2 as part of cooking unit, and used Kara Parker’s idea for giving instructions on how to make it.

What are your favorite resources for teaching food?

Food Unit Stamp Sheet

Hello, teacher friends. It’s a been awhile since I’ve wrote – November was a tough month for me, and it felt disingenuous to write about what I’m thankful for in the midst of so much stress at work.  I also didn’t feel inspired to write about what’s been going on in my classroom, because, frankly, my lessons have been pretty uninspiring.   Classroom management and behavior problems are part of the issue, but I’ve also been struggling to find a way to integrate my teaching philosophy with the more grammar-driven paradigm of my department. Most of November was a mad scramble of explicit grammar instruction and verb exercises in preparation for the midterm exam coming up next month. In December, I have two to two and a half weeks for teaching.  I’m starting Realidades Chapter 3A (breakfast and lunch foods), and I also need to teach ER and IR present tense conjugations in time for the midterm.  Here’s the stamp sheet I’ve come up with. I’m going to count it as a quiz grade, with each stamp being worth five or ten points. The first row is Novice-low level interpretative and presentational speaking goals. The second row is IP goals – I ask a question and they answer. The third row is a concession to my department’s grammar expectation. My goal is to contextualize the grammar better than I did in November, and to keep the English explanations and drills to a minimum. In other news, I’m running for a member-at-large position on the board of Georgia’s foreign language association, FLAG.  If you’re a member of FLAG, would you vote for me? If you teach language in Georgia and aren’t a member of FLAG, please consider membership – dues are just $25 a year and, among other benefits, allow your students to participate in FLAG’s annual spoken language contest.  The FLAG contest was a huge factor in me falling in love with Spanish – motivation to practice my speaking skills, one-on-one practice interviews (aka CONVERSATIONS) with my Spanish teacher, and the feeling of success that came with that big blue ribbon – I cannot recommend the contest enough!  If you’re interested in finding out more about the contest, or about FLAG in general, here is the link to their website.