PLN to the Rescue

It was Monday, last period of the day, and one of my students said, "Señora, are you losing your voice?"  My voice was a little hoarse, but I felt fine and promptly said, "No" and moved on with the lesson.  By 6:00 that evening, the only remnants of my voice was a whisper.  

What's a teacher to do when they feel fine, but they have no voice?  I had plans for the next two days that I didn't want to reschedule for later dates, plus I had a meeting with students after school the following day about a trip in 2014.

My first thought was, 'ask your PLN'.  I posted my question on Twitter

 

and within minutes other teachers in my PLN were sending me suggestions.
The suggestions included creative writing activities, webquests, videos, games (The Telephone Game; Read Write Draw), games based on songs or on videos, talking activities, reading, acting, illustrating, and vocabulary review in groups of two.

This is just another example of why everyone should have a PLN!

Which did I use? It was sort of a combination of several suggestions that involved reading and sketching.  I also found a 4-minute screencast that I had made two years ago for my Spanish 5 students to watch before they started writing their stories because I wanted expressions such as "él tenía miedo que...; ellos no permitieron que yo...." and I wanted them to hear sentences with the subjunctive fresh in their minds as they started to write.

I'll try out some of the other suggestions in the future, not necessarily for substitute plans.

THANKS to everyone for your suggestions.