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.)
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