Using Videos with TPRS - 2

My Spanish 1 students and I have been working on the Cuentos de Ensalada script (and enjoying it) but I decided that we needed something totally different for a few days to change things up a little. I pulled out a another video that I had also used with the Honors Spanish 4 class in the fall. The title of the video is "El Monstruo del Armario". I wanted to save it for Spanish 4, but once again I realized that since I'm using TPRS with my Spanish 1 students, they knew almost all of the vocabulary necessary to understand the initial telling of the story (by me) and for their retelling. In fact, I had to search for words that I could add into the story to increase their vocabulary.

The 3 vocabulary words I chose were: el pasillo, una pesadilla (which I never did work into the story), and enciende. Now that the lesson is finished, I wish I would have taken an extra day to also work with the following vocabulary: se acuesta, se acerca, and una cuerda.

Here is an outline of my lesson. I have 70-minute class periods and I started the lesson during the 2nd half of the period one day and continued it into the following day for 2/3 of the class. (If you haven't watched the video yet, then I suggest that you do so I don't ruin the ending for you in my description of the lesson. It's less than 3 minutes; suitable for secondary students.)

1. Write focus words on the board, translate them, PQA: el pasillo, una pesadilla, enciende. This was a perfect chance to include a lot of conversation when we talked about the different pesadillas that the students had when they were younger.

2. I told the story, reviewing after each new statement, and asking for their input but I "guided" them to give the answer I was looking for. Review the story with class retell and partner retells.

3. Show the video until 2:33, which is when the dad opens the wardrobe doors. Ask students to guess what he sees in the wardrobe. I had some great guesses - even "Eduardo, el elefante" that always seems to pop up in stories from time to time was one of the guesses. NOBODY guessed the right answer even though I kept telling them that it is a Spanish word that they know.

4. Then I continued the video until 2:37, stopping it as soon as the students saw the boy in the closet but before they see what is happening behind the dad.

5. I distributed the paper that is embedded below. Students worked in groups of 2 to write 11 sentences on the part of the video that they saw. It seemed the only problem with writing that the students had was that I didn't provide enough lines - they were able to saw more than 11 sentences!

Then after the 2nd photo on the paper, they had to write 4 sentences to describe what they thought happened next.


6. Students read their last 4 sentences aloud and other students translated them to English.

7. Finally, I showed them the last few seconds of the video.

8. For the last activity, I used a collage of the shots from the video, but this time instead of me saying a sentence and the students naming the number to which it pertains, the students said the sentences and then their classmates said which picture frame was described.



Or, here is a link of the same photo collage but only photos 1-9 so you can review the events up to the boy in the closet without the students seeing the last several photos.

***UPDATE***
Click HERE for @kplacido (Kristy Placido) script for the Monstruo del Armario reading



This morning I looked over the sentences that the students wrote on the worksheet and with just a few days until the end of the semester, I can clearly see the benefits of TPRS in their writing skills. Obviously with this story there isn't much need to use the verbs in anything other than the 3rd person singular, but the students' overall writing impressed me. It gives me assurance that they're adequately prepared to move onto Spanish 2 (but oh how I'd love to keep them for another few weeks or month!)

I may make some Cloze activities for them to do on Monday or make an audio recording with Quicktime for a listening exercise or, maybe I should just move on to the next chapter of Cuentos de Ensalada.