Let’s Eat!

Though I’d love to take all my students abroad to experience life in other cultures, the more realistic option is to bring the world to our classroom.  I’ve written before about using restaurant resources as the foundation of a novice level food unit–find the Subway menu activities for free here.

Having had the opportunity to travel recently, I have added a new activity to the collection: an interpretive and cultural activity pack around going to Five Guys in Madrid.  You can find it here.  While we work with iconic foods in Spanish-speaking countries throughout the unit, this activity is a fun, strong hook for a food/dining unit for novices.  Enjoy!

Many Hands Make Light Work (Structures & Strategies for supporting student success and teacher sanity part 10)

One of my favorite professional activities is collaborating with thought leaders who challenge me and push me to grow.  Meredith White (@prhsspanish on Twitter) is one of those educators, and I’m grateful for her collaboration.  Today we would like to share some resources that are the fruit of some of our ongoing work that:

1. provides structure for classroom management
2. maintains a focus on proficiency-driven language learning
3. is flexible and can be used in a variety of levels and units
4. reduces teacher workload and decision fatigue

Over the last few years we have both been working on streamlining some of our repetitive planning and tasks in a way that maintains high quality and engagement, but also adds an element of consistency.  This has lead to the creation of a collection of documents that are easily adapted from one unit or level to the next, and merely require tweaking for the unit at hand.  Generally, these documents include:

• a sheet to track daily warmups and performance task practice
• a partner signup sheet per unit
• vocab reference (in print or on Quizlet–my favorite!)
• vocab organizer
• roster-based interpersonal interview template
• Puedos (find out more here and here)

Meredith has compiled most of these documents for her first unit of level 1  into one packet, available here.

Here’s my latest version of the Daily warmup sheet that includes a Zipgrade answer sheet.  This year I’ll be teaching only pre- AP and AP, so this provides us with an easy way to do some quick AP-test style practice without having to prep yet another document.  Meredith uses the same idea in a different format to help prep students for district assessments.

And here’s a set of partner sign ups using flags of the Spanish-speaking world.

Finally, here’s a look at my current set of Puedos looks like for level 1, unit 1.  In Meredith’s packet you will see the general template; this document is what I would give to students.  One tip that cam from my students is to copy a page of the partner sign ups onto the back of the Puedos.  It makes finding their assigned partners for the day so much easier!

 

Calling all soccer fans–options for our classroom library

Here are a few more options of intriguing books for our classroom library that I found while in Spain–this time with a soccer theme.  The most requested theme from my students was superheroes and sports, so here are a few possibilities.

Sara y las Goleadoras is a positive, upbeat series that has female protagonists working creatively to overcome obstacles.  The author, Laura Gallego, also wrote another favorite  book from our library, Todas Las Hadas del Reino.

Antoine Griezmann is a top notch French pro player (currently for Atlético Madrid, but rumored to be going to Barça). He has a series of YA books that look appealing and have positive messages.

Superjusticieros del Fútbol caught my eye because it blended both requests: superheroes AND soccer 🙂