If you're a Spanish teacher and you haven't heard about Revista Literal yet, then I'm here to introduce you to this incredible resource. Revista Literal is the brainchild of Martina Bex, a language curriculum specialist and also the founder of The Comprehensible Classroom, the SOMOS curriculum, Garbanzo language website, and creator/writer of endless resources on TeachersPayTeachers (not to mention a national presenter and keynote speaker. I stated above, it is a FREE resource. According to the Revista Literal website, "Revista Literal is a monthly publication for beginning Spanish language learners written by Spanish language learners. Each month, readers submit short, original stories for publication."
After students submit their stories, Martina invites native Spanish speakers to proof the stories and then she adds glossaries for the stories and volunteers add the English translations to the glossaries. After the stories are proofed and have glossaries, Martina places the stories in an online format, creates a title page listing the stories for the month, and adds graphics to the stories. She credits the writers of the stories using the students' first name and town and state, and credits the volunteer proofers and glossary writers. Then she publishes the stories online as a free resource for Spanish teachers.
Then, voila, you have a free resource that comes to you each month to use with your students. Some of the stories are written in the present tense and others in the past.
Here are 10 ways to add the stories to your lesson plans.
1. Partner Reading. Students pair up with a partner and read the stories to each other for X number of minutes. This even works for your novice readers because of those beautiful glossaries for each story.
2. Extra Reading Resources. If you have students or parents asking what is available for a student that is struggling, or on the other end of the spectrum, a student that wants to continue learning beyond the classroom, tell them about Revista Literal. I download the resource (yes, you can download it if you prefer to read it on paper) and add it to our learning managagement system so it is always available to students.
3. Bell-ringer. Project a story from Revista Literal and ask comprehension questions for students to answer. Last week I projected the story "EL LABORATORIO" and alongside where it was projected I wrote the following questions for my Spanish 1 students to answer in English.
ANSWER IN ENGLISH:
1. Write 2 descriptions for Dave.
2. Write 3 facts about his job.
3. List 4 things about Karen.
Although I only asked for 2 descriptions for Dave, when I went over the answers with the class and a student responded with 2 of the descriptions, I asked what other descriptions were mentioned. I did the same with #2 and #2, Then we read the end of the story together.
4. Sub Plans! Use your imagination on how you can make your life easier when you need to be absent from work. Revista Literal will continue to provide comprehensible input to your students during your absence.
5. Running Dictation. Read Martina's explanation of Running Dictation here. If you want to put a new spin onto running dictation, use an online crossword puzzle creator and make a crossword puzzle of information from the story. You'll get double-whammy of reading out of the story because students read the story from Revista Literal (in the hall or wherever you have it posted) and then have to read the crossword clues at their "home base" in the classroom.
6. Chronological Order. Pull some sentences out of the story that can easily conform to a timeline and have the students predict the order of the story. Obviously, do not read the story with the students before this. If you want to do this as a group, show (tape to the board) 2 of the sentences and ask students which one is first in the story, then add another sentence and students decide the placement of the third sentence. Add another and continue; students can change the order as new sentences are added and the story order becomes clearer (or they think it becomes clearer).
7. Find It. Project the story, read it together with the students, then play Find It with flyswatters as explained here.
8. Mosaic Story(a). Do this before reading the stories with the students. Pull sentences from 3 different stories from Revista Literal and list the sentences on one paper in random order. Write a brief description of each of the stories (brief!-brief!-brief!) in English (don't mention any of the characters in the story by their name in the story), and the students' task is to determine which sentences go with which story.
9. Mosaic Story (b). Again, do not read the story with the students before completing this task. Pull sentences from several stories and have the students create a story using the sentences. You could tell students they can omit X number of sentences and/or you can tell students to add sentences to make the story flow. The Mosaic Story (b) activity will provide your novice high and intermediate students an opportunity to create with the language.
10. Go crazy! Students use any sentences from the entire monthly issue to create a short story. Limit the students to 10 sentences or whatever number works best for you. Come to think of it, THIS would be a good emergency sub plan to have available when you need it.
Obviously, since Revista Literal has stories, there are a boatload of possibilities.
Thank you Martina for making teaching a bit easier. ❤️
Ever since I stumbled across Charlala.com, thanks to a post on Twitter, my mind has been bombarding me with ideas of how to use it in class. If you don't know about Charlala.com yet, go to the website and explore (you will love it, I promise) and check out these explanations of how I've used it in the past.
My Spanish 1 students have watched Sr. Wooly's GUAPO video and completed a few of the extra activities that he provides on his website. One of those activities was the cloze activity. I printed the "fácil" version on one side of a paper and the "difícil" version of the cloze activity on the other side. (This is perfect for differentiating instruction in the classroom!)
After we went over the lyrics, students got an iPad and I instructed them to chose one of the lines in the story and to sketch it on the charlala.com webpage. If you know the GUAPO song, you know that the lyrics are repeated many times, which means there weren't many things for the students to draw. (But, this can be a good thing! Read on.)
After the students submitted their sketches, I projected many of them onto the board. First, students had to identify which line of the song the sketch represented and then we described more details about the sketches. It didn't matter that there were five sketches of a man with green eyes and brown hair. The students heard a huge amount of comprehensible input on high frequency structures (tiene, es, soy) plus useful adjectives, nouns, and expressions (guapo, feo, mujeres, alto, no es necesario).
If you use songs with your students and want a new way to re-use the song for more comprehensible input, give this a try! If your song is a story, after viewing the sketches, you could ask students to put the song in order using the sketches.
ENOY!
Short and simple: when you sense your lesson headed toward an eminent crash and burn - ABORT. Change things up or recreate your lesson on a fly but do NOT continue down that sad little destructive path.
Last Wednesday, I had what I thought was a well-planned, great lesson and I was going to provide loads of CI to my Spanish 1 students. But, for whatever reason, one particular group of students came to class and it felt as some unknown force had sucked out all of their energy on the way to my classroom, or maybe even in a previous class. Whatever caused it, was beyond my control. What happened in my class to turn that low energy into attentive and engaged students, was my task at hand.
Before I took my advice above, I trudged on, through a warm-up that was a bit too challenging, past the mini-lecture I gave to tell them about the power of a great education, and even a tried-and-true brain break that fell flat. I was minutes from a complete crash and burn.
Here I was, ready to go into the main part of the lesson, with a classroom of students running on "E" (empty). I was going to tell them a story about two friends that went to a horror movie, but in my mind's eye I didn't envision a good outcome.
Thankfully, I remembered what I've heard countless times at conferences and workshops and have told others many times: STUDENT ACTORS. Don't simply tell the story; have students act out the story. As (good) luck would have it, when I asked for actors, 5 students raised their hands, two of which can naturally draw and keep the attention of their classmates.
Within minutes of "hiring" the two actors and starting the storytelling process, the tide started to turn. The actors were funny but not distracting, I added movement (student actors "ran" around the room to arrive at the movie theater), I used props (Monopoly money and canisters for popcorn) plus a 3rd actor to sell the popcorn), and coached them to act scared, really scared, during the "horror movie".
My student actors were the difference between a ho-hum story and a funny, interactive story. The students' energy during the story as they watched the student actors and laughed with them, flowed over to the retell of the story and to the Write & Discuss. It allowed for loads of CI to receptive ears.
So, when you see the Crash and Burn nearing, abort. There's nothing wrong with that and everything wrong with ignoring the fact that something needs to change - immediately.
A few reminders when "hiring" student actors:
- be prepared to coach the students to bring out the best of them and the story
- don't accept mediocre
- if you need to "fire" student actors, do it swiftly, but gently
- thank the student actors for a job well done.
3. Bell-ringer. Project a story from Revista Literal and ask comprehension questions for students to answer. Last week I projected the story "EL LABORATORIO" and alongside where it was projected I wrote the following questions for my Spanish 1 students to answer in English.
