A French Toilet Paper commerical in Spanish Class

Last weekend I was browsing the public Spanish files on the Textivate site.  I found two ready-made and free resources to go along with the French Toilet Paper commercial found on Vimeo below.



French Toilet Paper Commercial With Tablet & Emma from Adpressive on Vimeo.

The Textivate activities include:
-  the Text of the commercial found here 
- Questions and Answers on the commercial found here  

The Textivate links above are examples of how to use Textivate with a short video or commercial.  

I used Textivate in a similar way as above to reinforce chapter 12 of Robo en la Noche, a beginner level Spanish reader.  Click HERE for an explanation of how to use Textivate with novels or articles.
 

Robo en la noche - ch 11, 12, & 13

The  last few days my students have read chapters 11, 12, and 13 in the TPRS Publishing, Inc, book, Robo en la noche, by Kristy Placido (@placido on Twitter). 

Chapter 11
1. We read the chapter together; some classes read it in small groups.
2. I chose a student to be the "all-time artist". 
3. The other students formed groups of 3-4.  Each group had a marker, a mini-marker board, and an eraser.
4. I had prepared a pack of index cards.  On each card I wrote a sentence from chapter 11 (in the TL). Many of the sentences were long so I chose a number from 3-7, wrote it at the top right of the card, and circled it.  
5. The artist sketched the sentence on the board and the groups had to look for the sentence in the book.  I wrote the circled number on the board and that represented how many words they needed to write in the sentence. (I didn't want to spend time on the students writing long sentences.)
6. To keep the activity moving, after I thought the artist had provided sufficient information in the sketch, I started a timer on the iPad for 1 minute. When the timer went off, I told students to hold up their marker boards and checked for the correct sentence.  Spelling and punctuation counted in this activity since they were copying from the book. It also helped to keep everyone in the group involved because they didn't want someone in their group copying incorrectly from the book.

Because we are going through Keystone Testing for two weeks, it means my 1st period class is 2 hours and the second class is 26 minutes. They rotate each day so the instruction time is not uneven at the end of the two weeks.  I felt I needed a review activity for several of the chapters, so I also created the activity with the sketches (seen at top of the post) and the sheet with statements to be matched to the sketches for chapter 11.  

I used the same sketches and made a short video using ExplainEverything and then exported the movie to my Dropbox.  I now have this available to post on Edmodo for students that were absent.

Other possible activities to use with the sketches:
- Don't distribute the statement sheet, but rather have the students look for the statements in the book.
- The teacher can say a statement and students determine which sketch matches it.
- The teacher can retell the chapter, using the sketches as a guide.
- Students can retell the chapter to a partner or in small groups, using the sketches as a guide.
- Ask students to say as many sentences as possible about each sketch.
- Put the sketches in random order on a smartboard program such as Notebook.  Students order the sketches. (It may be best to break the sketches into two groups to make it easier to work with the sketches.)
- Put the sketches on a smartboard program and let the students guess what happens in the chapter BEFORE they read the chapter.

Chapter 12
1. I wrote 12 comprehension questions about information on chapter 12.  After students read the chapter, I uploaded the questions to Textivate. 
2. The first activity on Textivate the students completed was MultiMatch.
3. The second and third activity they did on Textivate was the Memory 6 (as a practice) and Memory 12.

Chapter 13
Order of activities before and after chapter 13 of "Robo en la noche":  
Preview of chapter 13 
1. Several days before reading chapter 13, choose 9 sentences from the chapter that will be easy to illustrate and tells the events of the chapter.
2. Give the sentences to 9 different students. They will sketch them on a small (less than 1/6 sheet) piece of paper.
3. Collect sketches and hold onto them until you are ready to read chapter 13.
4. Put sketches under a document camera. Students describe the sketch in the TL.
5. Put sketches in order. (Remember that this is before you have read the chapter w/ the students.) Teacher chooses the first sketch of the chapter and another one (make it obvious that is happens somewhere other than the first 1/2 of the chapter.
6. Ask students which sketch they think is first in the chapter.
7. After they decide which is first, choose two other sketches and ask which they think is first.
8. Continue until the 9 sketches are in the correct order.
In this way, the students basically knew what happened in the chapter which made it (even more) comprehensible to all the students.

Reading and After Reading 
1. As you read, you can leave the sketches under the document camera and students raise their hand or stand up when we read a sentence that they think matches with the sketch.
2. As soon as you finish chapter 13, instruct all students to close books.
3. Ask which students have seen the following movies: Money Ball, Secretariat, Remember the Titans, etc. Discuss the epilogue that describes what the characters of the story are doing now.
4. Put students in groups of two and tell them to write an epilogue that would be appropriate to play at the end of a movie. 
Since they didn't read the last two chapters yet, they will need to use their imaginations
I used the following 5 characters:  Makenna, el Dr. David Parker, Inés, Cecilio, and Juan Carlos.
5. Collect the student-written epilogues. Read them to the class going through all the Makenna scripts first, then el Dr. Parker, etc. Correct the mistakes on the spot which makes students shine.

I did the epilogue activity with two of my classes.  The more creative the students were the better they liked the activity. I instructed them to be creative but to write logical scenarios.  One of my favorites was that Juan Carlos stopped working for the MINAE and decided to enter the Lucha Libre culture as a fighter with the name "El ave".  It was nice to hear they remembered that information from when I shared stories that included the culture of Mexico.        

Robo en la noche - ch 6 & 7

When I read a mini-novel with my students, we are not always able to read a chapter each day. For the times when more than one day has passed between reading chapters, I plan a quick review to review what has previously happened in the book.  Below are plans and resources I made and used for chapters 6 and 7 of Kristy Placido's book Robo en la Noche.

 Verbal Review before reading Chapter 6 of Robo en la noche
1. ¿En qué  país están Makenna y su padre?
2. ¿Por qué fueron ellos a Costa Rica? ¿De vacaciones? ¿Para visitar a la madre de Makenna?
3. ¿Cuál es la ocupación del Dr. David Parker?
4. ¿Quién es Cecilio?
5. ¿Qué es la relación entre Margarita e Inés?
6. ¿Cuántos años tiene Inés?
7. Si Inés tiene cuarenta y tres años, ¿cuántos años piensan Uds. tiene Margarita?
8. ¿Quién es Ricardo?
9. ¿Es Ricardo el primer esposo de Margarita? ¿el segundo?
10. ¿Qué pasó a su primer esposo? ¿Fue a Puerto Rico? ¿Salió Costa Rica para trabajar en otro país?
11. ¿Por cuántos años vivió Inés con su padre? (Trick question)
12. ¿Ricardo adoptó a Inés?
13. ¿Quién es Juan Carlos? (Es el hermano de Cecilio? ¿Es el amigo de Makenna? ¿Es el hijo de Ricardo?)

Chapter 7 of Robo en la noche

1. I recorded myself reading chapter 7 because I did not want to read it 3 times (I have 3 Spanish 2 classes this semester.)

2. As students listened to the reading, they completed the worksheet below 

I made the second version of the worksheet with additional prompts that I posted to our Edmodo group for those students that were not in class.  I also could use the second version in an effort to differentiate learning in my classroom. 

3. My original plan was to put students in pairs and have them write questions that a policeman would ask Makenna regarding the robbery of the birds and what she saw the next day. Then I was going to have them record their conversation and email the file to me. Ten minutes into the activity I realized this was a bad decision on my part and after thirty minutes, I collected the papers and ended future work on this. 

For my afternoon class, we wrote 6 possible police questions in the "tú" form together and then answered them as if we were Makenna (using the "yo" form.)

4. After my failed plans in #3, I decided to use the paper found HERE to basically do the same thing I was attempting to do before (give students more exposure to the tú form and answer in the "yo" form). Hopefully it will be more useful than the #3 activity.



**updated/corrected thanks to comments left by an anonymous :) reader. I always welcome corrections from my readers but I would ask that you be respectful when leaving comments about the corrections.  I continue to be a "student" of the language and enjoy growing in my knowledge when it is presented in a considerate and respectful manner :-)😉 

As a wise friend says, "Always take the high road. It may not be the easiest, but the view is always better!"
 


   

Listing action verbs in a Film Short

Several weeks ago (maybe months), my colleague Krista told me that she used one of the Simon's cat short films with her French class. I knew about the videos but never added the films into my lesson plans.  Finally, I added Simon's cat, "Fly Guy" to my Spanish 2 class to mix things up since we've been busy reading a mini-novel.

Instead of narrating the video as it played, I promised the students I would be quiet for the entire video. They watched it 2 times: 1st time, they jotted down (in Spanish of course) the actions of the cat, the man, and even the fly; 2nd time, they added to their individual lists of actions PLUS wrote action words in English from the video that they didn't know. 



After the second time the students told me the verbs they wrote and I listed them on the board.  Most of them were in the preterit tense, but there were a few that were descriptions (the imperfect tense).  I was pleasantly surprised at how huge the list was! Some of the words were ones that that they only heard from stories I read for "Kindergarten Day" or from the stories from the A-Z Reading website.

After the verbs were listed on the board, I told students they had 5 minutes to write what happened in the video. The list of boards was their "cheat sheet".

I hadn't planned to use the video in my Spanish 4b class but one of the students in that class is my Service Learner student and he was in the classroom earlier in the day to see the activity.  He asked if we could do a similar activity, so I made a last minute change and they watched the video, then worked in groups of 3 to list the verbs. They listed verbs that described every (mili)second of action in that video, using every possible way to describe it, PLUS they eventually looked up (& were exposed to, but not necessarily learned from such short exposure) a few words such as "pounce". (Not high frequency but they wanted to know how to say it.)

Using Videos in the MFL Classroom

I enjoy short films and advertisements in class. The Slideshare below was created for ESL teachers, but it may give you ideas on how to use videos in a classroom in ways other than MovieTalk.  

HERE is the link to more information on a webinar this week given by David Deubelbeiss.

Video in the classroom from David Deubelbeiss

Robo en la noche - chapters 1-3

If you are looking for a Spanish reader for your students that also includes culture of a Spanish-speaking country, you may want to consider Kristy Placido's (@placido) book, "Robo en la noche" which takes place in Costa Rica.

My Spanish 2 students are reading "Robo en la noche", which is the third book for the semester.  We read chapters 1 and 2 last week, and chapter 3 yesterday.  Since there are now 5 main characters that have been introduced in the first three chapters, I wanted to provide a quick activity with the goal to review the characters and their role in the story.  To do this, I listed the five characters and then took sentences directly from the book that gives information about the characters.  Students need to read the sentences and match the character to the description.

As the students were completing the paper in class, I heard some of the students clarifying which woman was the mother and which was the daughter, and discussing the role that Cecilio played in the story.  Because I know this information plays an important part in the rest of the story, I wanted to make sure that the students had this information in order so they could relate it to what happens in the upcoming chapters.

The paper is available HERE.  
Since the lines are taken directly from the book, I asked and received Kristy's permission to make the paper available here. 

Great Idea for Engaging Students

This morning I read Martina Bex's idea for "Soliticing Illustrated Responses" on her blog.  It is a great way to keep the students engaged and active participants in the story-asking process.

Find her post HERE.

Yet another great idea to use with TPRS!