As I was searching through the large collection of Spanish videos on Discovery Education, I found the video "Clic Clac Muu, Vacas Escritoras". Since I live on a dairy farm it caught my attention so I watched it. It's a funny story, with cute animations and, best of all, the narrator speaks very clearly. I used this video with my Sp4 class. (update: The video USED to be available on YouTube, but when I checked it today, March 2013, I found out it is no longer available. Maybe it will be reloaded onto youtube in the future.)
Suggestions for preparing students for the video:
1. Several days before showing the video, pull out vocabulary from the video that you think the students either don't know or need to review.
My goal was for them to understand the entire narration. Some of the vocabulary and phrases I chose were: no habrá, ¿Quién ha oído semejante cosa?, una huelga, la manta, desde afuera, no podía creer lo que oía, and le entregó.
2. If you spend the first day of the school week talking about your weekend, choose 3 of the above words/phrases and make comments or questions using those words. As you use them, write them on the board for students to see. It's a sneaky way to introduce new vocabulary, but it works. I chose the phrase "¿Quién ha oído semejante cosa" and used it after a student said something about their weekend. The students picked up on this expression and I heard them saying it voluntarily the day I repeatedly said it in reaction to the what the students said about their weekends, as well as the following day.
3. Cut out an article from a newspaper but don't let them see the title. It can be about anything. Then act as if you're telling them a news story, but really it's "fake news" to introduce new vocabulary. My "fake news" was about workers at a plant that went on strike and the neighbors brought them blankets at night to keep warm.
4. Let the students create a story using several new vocabulary words.
By Friday my students knew the new vocabulary and were ready for the movie.
There is now an "Extra gap-fill" button on the textivate editor screen at http://www.textivate.com - this allows you to define your own gaps for an additional user-defined gap-fill exercise.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this information Martin. The "extra gap-fill" button will make textivate more useful!
ReplyDelete¡Muchísimas gracias!
ReplyDeleteThis story was my son's favourite as a child - he's now 14! and as a Spanish teacher I love that it is in Spanish too. As soon as I have a suitable class, I'll be using your great ideas too.
Lisa xx