I planned today's lesson before our Thanksgiving break, which was a week ago. Some of the new structures for today included: hace frío = it's cold hay mucha nieve = there is a lot of snow está nevando = it is snowing We also had 3 new clothing words: el gorro (hat); la chaqueta (jacket) & los mitones (mittens).
As luck would have it, the first snowfall of the winter season greeted us this morning and it was still snowing when I taught both my Spanish 1 classes.
Because I'm feeling crunched for time, we didn't stray much from the story I had previoulsy typed during the "story-asking". At one point in the lesson, I decided to pause and ask the students to think of reasons why the boy in the story is surprised (está sorprendido). They worked in groups of 2 or 3 to think of a sentence and then shared them with the class. I was so impressed with their answers because the majority of them were complicated, compound sentences filled with adjectives and prepositions, AND they were grammatically correct.
At the end of the story they eachwrote another sentence on the paper with the typed story to say why the boy was surprised again.
This link will take you to the story if you care to read it. The words in this lesson will help prepare the students to watch the video ALMAwhich I showed to my Spanish 1 students last fall and was a big hit with them. We need one more day of learning several vocabulary words and then we'll be ready for video....finally!
This is a hard copy of the on-line CLOZE activity to review the Alma video. When we did this activity in class, I first gave the handout of the cloze activity for them to complete. To go over the paper, the students read their answers as I used the drag and drop on the online site to insert the correct answers. Hard-Copy of Cloze activity to distribute to students
Last week when I was driving home I realized that my students in Spanish 1 knew almost all of the words necessary to understand an interesting animated video that I had used earlier for a conversation activity with my Spanish 4 students. I decided to pre-teach the remaining words and then used TPRS to explain and act out the story. ****UPDATE**** Update - ALMA continues to gain popularity! Below are links toadditional ALMA activities recently created (Dec. 2012-Jan 2013) by other teachers.All updates can be found on Laurie Clarcq's amazing "Embedded Reading" blog. a - Click HEREto see @fravan amazing activity on ALMA. b - Click HEREfor an Embedded Reading (created by Nina) c - Alma LECTURA(created by Doug Stone) d - Alma Repasito (created by Doug Stone) ****UPDATE****
1. The two stories used to pre-teach some of the vocabulary and the ALMA story are in the document below. For the Osama story, we made the story in class and the following day I distributed the paper so students could fill in the blanks as a review and then we wrote the ending of the story.
2. After the pre-teaching of vocabulary was finished, I told the story about Alma using TPRS, circling technique, w/ some acting. After I told a small part of the story, I paused so students could sketch the scene. They sketched 6 different scenes. Then I showed the movie "Alma" and stopped the movie right before Alma touches the nose of the doll, because, of course, we ran out of time to watch the ending.
3. Since I stopped the video before Alma actually touched the doll's nose, the students' homework for the night was to sketch what they thought happened. The next day, one of the review activities was to put their sketches under the document camera and students had to think of a sentence or sentences to describe what was going to happen. The sketches were also handy as a review of the story - partner work for retelling usually works great.
4. I also made a photo collage of parts of the story. Photo collages or sketches are great for reviewing because I will say a sentence and then the students tell me which picture that action occurred. Or, sometimes as a class we retell the story frame by frame using the photo collage or a student's sketch.
view video at: http://youtu.be/irbFBgI0jhM
5. Tomorrow we will do 3 Cloze activities as another review of the vocabulary and events in the story.
UPDATE: Click HERE to find additional ALMA materials (they're awesome!) that Martina Bex created in December 2011.
I love finding short videos to use in the class. The students like it because it changes things up for the day and I like it because it keeps their attention which means more repetitions with a captive audience.
Next year when I use this story, I'll pre-teach more clothing vocabulary first! That was a missed opportunity.
**Even though many people recommend using past tenses from the start, I am in my first semester of only TPRS with my Spanish 1 students so I'd like to feel a bit more comfortable with the TPRS method before I teach the past tense from Day 1.**
