New Year, New Chat Mat: Low Prep, High Impact plans for the first days back

Nothing like a good chat mat to support student conversations on the first days back to school after holiday break! No need to stress over planning–this resource can work for beginners through advanced students to spark ideas and scaffold their skills. It’s also a great tool to help establish (or re-establish) connections and community within your classroom.

I updated a winter-themed chat mat and plan to roll it out this week. Students will want to talk to their classmates, so let’s help them do what they want to do in Spanish! 

Download a copy of the Spanish chat mat here:

weekend-chat-placemat-winter-back-from-break-2024-1Download

Here is an updated French version, correcting a leftover Spanish phrase:

french-new-year-weekend-chat-matDownload

Italian:

italian-new-years-weekend-chat-placematDownload

German:

german-new-years-weekend-chat-placematDownload

New to weekend chat? Check out this blog post from Super Señora to get started. See other posts about using chat mats & weekend chat here.

There’s something fishy over here–Fishbowl strategy for speaking & IA prep

Goldfish icons created by Freepik – Flaticon

The Fishbowl strategy has been around education for quite a while to promote speaking, interaction, and peer feedback between students. While there were many things that appealed to me about the activity, there were some aspects that I didn’t feel were good fits for our classroom culture. However, after a discussion with a Fishbowl veteran teacher, I made some changes to the classic structure of the activity that I think made it work for us–especially as part of our preparation for the IB Standard Level IA assessment. I’m sharing this activity here in the hopes that others might fid it helpful as well.

Preparation by teacher ahead of the activity:

1. Divide the class into groups of about 5-6 students
2. Copy the student handout for each student.
3. Select a pair of photos similar to what you would use for the IA for each small group of students. Put each pair of photos on a slide like at the end of these slides. 
   • Note: for copyright purposes, I used clip art from flaticon.com in the example shared here. In class we used culturally appropriate photos rather than the clip art 🙂
4. The duration of the activity will depend on your class size. In my class of 30+, this took us one full 90 minute block + a little overflow into the next period.

Activity process:

1. There will be two processes going on simultaneously in the shape of two circles, one within the other.
   • One group–a small group of 5-6 students–will move to the middle of the classroom. They will be the group that speaks first.
   • The rest of the students will remain on the outer edges of the small inside circle. They will be listening to the speakers, offering feedback, and creating questions/extensions on what is said by the speakers in the middle.
2. Give each student a copy of the student handout. Explain the general process using these slides.
3. Project the first pair of photos with the caption of the theme addressed. The small group will briefly discuss which photo is their preference and come to consensus on which they want to discuss. Leave the photos up throughout the group’s speaking time.
4. Set a timer for 1 minute. The small group will use this minute to jot down bullet points on their handout to support their discussion, similar to the style on the IA.
5. Set a timer for speaking. For the first time through the activity, I used 8 minutes. During this time:
   • The students in the middle group will talk about the photo: describing it, discussing cultural and personal connections, and relating it to the theme.
   • The students who are listening jot down feedback on their handout plus look to create questions and extensions to the discussion in the middle. I added this piece to help us prepare for phase 2 of the IA where I would ask them additional information about the things they mentioned while describing the photo.
6. After the time is up, allow an additional minute or so for students in both groups to write down feedback on their handout for the speaking group. 
7. Call on several outer circle students to share their questions & extensions. Inner circle students respond appropriately.
8. Ask students from both groups to share feedback.
9. Congratulate the inner group on a job well done! I briefly shared 1-2 things that the group did well, and occasionally made a suggestion for improvement.
10. Rotate groups and repeat the process

Reflection:

This went really well. Students were highly engaged, and there was a lot of effort on their part to incorporate the feedback as we went along. I love how this is now a very low prep, but high impact activity since it is easily adaptable for any topic or unit and gives us a lot of semi-authentic speaking practice without being scripted. I am grateful for a structure that allows everyone–especially in my large classes–to speak and to be heard. Students were fans too! Here is some of their commentary & feedback after the activity:

Have you tried a similar activity? Please share your ideas in the comments!

Strategies for AP Success: Cultural Comparison

Kelly Gardner shared the idea of a Cultural Comparison round table in a Facebook group for AP Spanish teachers. With her permission, I adapted the idea for my classes and am sharing it here.

We are at the end of a unit about the role of grandparents and the impact of technology/social media on our lives. These topics combine for a wide range of comparisons, and create a great set up for the round table format.

Students had many positive things to say about the activity, especially about how it is a confidence booster. Here are some of their post-activity comments:

Here is the process that I used:

1. Divide your class into groups of about 3-4 students.
2. Create a set of cards, each with a different question in the style of the AP Cultural Comparison questions. 
   • Need inspiration for questions? Check out this list. 
   • Easy way to make cards: put each question on a slide in your favorite slide software. Print the slides 4/page and poof! Cut apart and your cards are ready to go.
   • Print one set of cards per group
3. Print handouts for each student.
   • Page 1 & 2 are the same, but with slightly different formats. Pick your favorite. Students do NOT need both.
   • Put page 3 on the back of page 1 or 2
   • Pages 4 & 5 go together and I usually hold them back until we are ready for them later in the process.
4. Walk students through the brainstorming & collaborative process (as shown on these slides)
   • In small groups of 3-4 students, each student draws a card with a question
   • One student reads their card to the group. The group writes the question down in “tema #1 box” on p. 1 of the student handout
   • The group brainstorms possible comparison points for the topic–similarities & differences–and notes them in the space provided for the question.
   • Repeat these steps until each student’s question has been discussed & brainstormed. Emphasize the collaborative nature of this phase (rather than divide & conquer)
5. Next up: creating draft #1 of the comparison speech
   • Now each student selects one of the questions that had been discussed in the steps above. It doesn’t matter if more than one student chooses a particular question, as this phase will be completed individually.
   • Using handout pages 4-5, students transform their bullet points into their actual presentation using the guide to help them with structure, language, and pacing.
   • The amount of time allotted will vary based on students’ experience level. They had 8 minutes to do this step this time through. We will keep trimming that time down to the 4 minute mark by May.
6. Time to present! Continuing to work in small groups, students will take turns presenting their presentations with the notes they prepared in the previous step.
   • While one student is presenting, the others will use the table on p. 3 of the student handout to prepare feedback for their group mate.
   • After the presentation, allow a minute or two for feedback from the group to the presenter.
   • Repeat this process until all have presented to their groups.
7. Implement feedback + prep & record final draft
   • All students use the feedback they received from their groups to make edits as indicated
   • All students record their presentations. My favorite tool: Formative!

All in all: this activity structure is a keeper! It’s flexible enough to apply to any unit and took about 1 1/2 90 minute periods. The student engagement level is HIGH and allows me to facilitate, coach, and answer questions to meet student needs in the moment. The vibe in the room was positive and easy to tell that students were feeling less stressed about this component than before.

If you try this out in your classes, please let me know how it goes! PS–gracias Kelly!

La Lotería Española de Navidad 2023

The Lotería de Navidad commercials are some of my favorite authentic resources to use in class each year–and this year is no exception. They are rich stories that are great conversation starters and though they are linked with Christmas, the message of each video is about community and sharing rather than a religious message. My favorite of all time is from 2015, Justino.

This year is no exception. Set in Madrid, it continues the tradition of short films telling big stories. In collaboration with my dear friend and amazing colleague Maris Hawkins, we have prepared a unit built around this year’s commercial spot. The materials are free to download here and use in your classrooms. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do!

Building Better Notebooks: Scaffolding AP Students’ Success

I’ve been teaching AP for about 10 years now, and each year has been different from the last. I continue to refine and try to improve my teaching practice, and therefore the learning experience for my students. Just when I thought I had hit my stride, COVID changed everything! This past year was normal-ish, but at the end of the year I found that students were struggling to be in touch with the content that we had studied early in the year. Our class takes place on alternate days all year long, so the gap between the start of the year and the AP exam in May can be long. Lots of our work was in digital formats, and students didn’t have easy access to tangible resources to help them review & refresh their knowledge, let alone to make comparisons and connections that we want them to make.

While we were doing school at home during the pandemic I had played with some long-term digital organizers. Some students reported them to be very helpful; others, not as much. I wasn’t thrilled with the overall outcome, so I put them on the back burner for a while.

This year, however, I am trying something new in collaboration with my teaching partner for our classes. We are intentionally reshaping the digital organizers into old-school paper fashion and merging them with features of interactive notebooks. Our goals:

1. create a reference tool to support students as they progress through the course
2. improve the collection & storage of content over the course of the year to help students study for their exam
3. reduce the need to repeatedly provide handouts (streamline distribution of scaffolding documents)

We are asking each student to bring a composition notebook as part of their back to school supplies. We are watching for them to go on super sale this summer and will provide them for students who don’t have them. So far, here’s the general outline that we are playing with:

1. index/table of contents
2. reference: alternative words for common expressions like bien, divertido, & interesante
3. personal dictionary
4. reference: circumlocution phrases
5. reference: annotation & self-correcting guides
6. reference: AP themes/subthemes
7. reference: current event guide & instructions
8. reference: photo description
9. a section for each of the 4 free response questions
   • instructions
   • rubric
   • guided template
   • chat mat/reference of helpful phrases & vocabulary
   • space to glue in examples of completed work
10. reference: overview of common conjugations + most common verbs
11. space for noting cultural content based on essential questions & common themes.

Many of these documents and resources already exist, as they are documents we have been using in class in various formats. We are adapting them to fit into the composition notebooks as well as creating dividers to organize each section.

While these are not truly “interactive” notebooks in the truest sense, I’m holding out hope that they will be a valuable tool for our students. If you’ve used notebooks like these in an upper level WL class, what tips would you give? Please comment below!

Cupside Down: Low prep, low tech, high engagement game

I am a huge fan of well-designed activities that are versatile enough to be adapted across units, levels, and languages as a way of reducing my workload while still creating a challenging learning environment for students.

Cupside Down is one of those activities and we just played it for the first time yesterday. I learned about the game from Carrie Toth at Somewhere to Share–find the explainer & directions here.

Preparation took me about 20 minutes total: about 10 minutes writing questions and another 10 creating a slide deck to introduce the game to students. Next time will be less because the slides are already done :). I already had the other necessary materials: about 20 cups per team (a different color for each team) from Dollar Tree, whiteboards, markers, and erasers. That’s it!

You can get a copy of the slides I used at the link below. You will still need Carrie’s instructions to accompany them and the combination made explaining it to students smooth and easy.

Students reacted enthusiastically and positively to the game which required no tech and challenged them to work in teams to review content. Give it a try! It’s an easy one to add to your repertoire!

cupside-down-cup-up-game-for-blogDownload

Slaying the AP Argumentative Essay Beast (Structures & Strategies for supporting student success and teacher sanity)

In the AP Spanish Language & Culture course, one of the free response questions is for students to write an essay arguing a position on a topic while integrating three provided resources in their essay. This is a tall challenge for students at this age, and even more so when doing this in another language

After struggling through this process for years without much success–but with much stress and occasional tears–I reached out to some ELA colleagues and resources for recommendations on how to improve this process for students AND for me. At the time, I had approximately 90 students in AP, so teaching the process plus grading 90 essays was daunting at best just to get through them. However, I wanted to do more than just get through them AND my students needed feedback and coaching in order to do this task well. The overwhelming feeling was soul-crushing.

Until I read this post about writing group essays. By having students work collaboratively in groups, the instruction piece is similar, students support each other, and most importantly, the grading/feedback demands are reduced to a manageable level for me. Instead of trying to coach 90 students through writing a good thesis statement + intro paragraph, I only work through about 30. Same thing for the rest of the essay–we go chunk by chunk, but in a much more manageable quantity. This means that students can actually get feedback in a reasonable amount of time when they actually remember what they wrote!

Here’s the handout I use with students and an outline of the process I used when working on the essay in Spanish for the first time:

Group Argumentative Essay Coaching Pack (blank topic)Download

1. Introduce the concept of the FRQ.
2. Students read/interact with source documents individually. I like to use Formative activities to support & verify comprehension. As they read/listen, they take notes on ideas that are for and against the topic question.
3. Students do an activity in Formative where they sort information from the sources into pro/con/neutral categories and then write a first draft of a thesis statement. You can see an example here. This can also be done collaboratively.
4. Based on student responses, I place them in groups of 3 with similar points of view. These will be their essay writing groups.
5. We review thesis statements, providing feedback. Formative is very helpful for this, as I can project their responses from step 3 above without their names. We talk about the features of a strong thesis statement and work together to improve others.
6. Groups take their 3 individual thesis statements and read them and mash them up to make an even better thesis statement for the whole group.
7. Groups draft 1 intro paragraph for their group and then hand in for feedback.
8. I provide feedback and explain the CER structure for body paragraphs: Claim, Evidence to support the claim, and Reasoning. The group divides and conquers, with each student tackling ONE of the three body paragraphs.
9. Group members peer check each other with a checklist (in handout) of critical pieces like identifying sources, transitions, etc.
10. Groups submit their 3 paragraphs for feedback.
11. I hold feedback conferences with each group.
12. Groups edit their work based on feedback + write a collaborative conclusion paragraph.
13. Groups submit final draft for grading.

In addition to streamlining the grading/feedback process for me, I have noticed improved student performance and confidence as a result of the process. Using tools like Formative to allow interactive real time feedback in the early stages has improved students’ vision of the task as we begin. Being able to collaborate with peers helps students get help that they need as they work and I am able to go from group to group to intervene and support as needed. I do believe that the most powerful aspect of this process is the personalized, timely feedback which is possible by this process.

Eventually students do need to write this type of essay individually. We will do a few group essays with significant scaffolding support before asking students to tackle it individually. The first time takes us several days, but each successive time it takes us less and less. The collaborative process is powerful and liberating, and I am thankful to Building Book Love for sharing this idea in her blog!

Watch Party + AP FRQ

A quick activity for AP Spanish Language + Culture built around the concept of offering/responding to an invitation to a World Cup Watch Party in the form of a directed conversation.

This is actually two activities in one: we start with doing the conversation as a text conversation to work through how to do the task and what kinds of things are required. Then we do it in the classic form with students responding to the spoken prompts (which are the content of the first column of the text conversation). I have found that approaching this FRQ in this manner has been very helpful in boosting student confidence AND performance.

I hope you find this helpful! You can get a copy of the activity here.

ap-guided-text-directed-conversation-invitation-to-world-cup-watch-partyDownload

Welcome ACTFL 2022!

Matt and I are thrilled and honored to present at ACTFL this year. Here are some resources from our presentation:

Matt has a “how to build a sentence builder” document here:

actfl-2022-how-do-i-make-a-sentence-builderDownload

From Gianfranco Conti: https://language-gym.com and samples here: https://language-gym.com/es/book/9/unit/24

Free Weekend Chat Mats here.
See Amy Lenord’s resources here.
Sample sentence builders here.

My presentation remote control is available here.

Trying to choose a book: ¿Por qué no los dos? Why not both?

Hello blog, it’s been a while!

One of the common themes in my classes is that we have so much good stuff to explore, but never enough time. This spring I was trying to decide which comprehensible readers we were going to read in my Spanish 4 class. Faced with the decision of Selena or Santana, I chose… both. While at various points I questioned the wisdom of my decision, it turned out well. Here’s how we did it:

1. About 2 weeks before I wanted to start reading, I book talked both books, telling students a bit about both–that both had glossaries to support them, they were approximately the same length, and I thought both would interest them.
2. Students picked up copies of both books, then chose 1 to start. I set a timer for 5 minutes and asked students to read the back cover + start in chapter 1. After 5 minutes, switch books & repeat.
3. Students filled out an online form showing which book was their preference.
4. I started preparing to teach two books!
5. One helpful discovery: it’s possible to run simultaneous games in platforms like Gimkit, Blooket, and Quizlet Live. It took a little getting used to, but we would generate two games/game codes–1 per book– to play our favorites at the same time.
6. Another helpful lesson from an English teaching colleague: we read the book in chunks of chapters rather than each chapter by chapter. This helped us to keep up the momentum of our stories but without us bogging down. Also, because our schedule has our classes on alternating days, a chapter a day drags!
   1. Selena was broken down into these chapter chunks: 1-3, 4-5, 6-8, and 9-10
   2. Santana: 1-4, 5-9, 10-12, & 13-15.
7. The teachers’ guides would have been very helpful, but I didn’t have access to them. I made study guides and materials for each chunk of chapters that included vocabulary, guiding questions, cultural investigations, and personal connections. Students worked on these + reading in small groups in class.
8. I loved being freed up to be a facilitator of groups rather than being the one leading class as students worked in a blend of semi-independent and small group work. Certain groups needed more support and I was able to work with them as needed while also allowing groups who didn’t need it to move on.
9. We did a few whole class activities spread out through the unit.
   1. Two song activity packs–one by each artist. You can download a copy of what we did at these links: Corazón Espinado by Maná & Carlos Santana & Como la Flor by Selena.
   2. SmashDoodles at the midway point to review what we’d learned so far
   3. A small group speaking assessment based on this activity by Carrie Toth.
   4. A re-enacted graphic novel version of their books. More to come on this fun activity soon!

Takeaways:

1. The gap in prep time was really helpful. It allowed me to get fully ready to tackle both books, including a thorough reading, breaking down the book into chunks, and thoughtfully creating supporting content.
2. Students reported a boost in their confidence in being able to read a book like this. After our experience with pandemic learning, this benefit cannot be overstated. Though both books are rated for lower level classes, they were right on target for what these students needed. Plus these students had skills to be able to extend the content further.
3. Students who had an opinion were in favor of this method. Some of their unedited feedback from exit surveys:

Based on their feedback, we are doing this again with Minerva & Felipe Alou. I’m being even more intentional about building in conversation moments as we progress through the books and encouraging more intentional collaboration. Since these books take place in approximately the same time frame, we will also have more activities that all students will do and encourage them to make comparisons and connections regardless of the book that they are reading.

You can see other activities that I’ve done with Felipe Alou and the film In the Time of Butterflies in these previous posts. I hope this is helpful!

Introduction to Felipe Alou

In the Time of the Butterflies, part 1