Try THE MATCH GAME in your MFL class!

The Match Game is a TV panel game that features two contestants that try to match the answers of a 6-member panel.  The game premiered in 1962 on CBS and was updated several times during it's run. The game show host would read a sentence with a blank in it and the contestants wrote an answer to fill in the blank, earning points for each member on the panel that wrote the same answer.

I used the general idea of this game show in class today to reinforce the nosotros (1st person singular) form in the past tense.  It's an easy game that my students enjoyed and which  allowed the students to provide Comprehensible Input to their classmates. It also was a good game to play to add some pizzazz to my 2-hour class today due to state testing.

Teacher prep for The Match Game  
Write a list of situations in the TL on notebook paper or you can write them on a powerpoint slide. These are the sentences I used today:
- Nosotros fuimos a un partido de los Hershey Bears. (a hockey team)
- Encontramos $2.000 en el parque.
- Vimos a Big Foot.
- Fuimos al concierto de Beyoncé.
- Vimos a Zac Efran en Hershey, PA.
- Fuimos a Disney World.
- Compramos un árbol de Navidad.*
- Fuimos a Hawaii.
- Preparamos la cena.
- Visitamos a nuestros abuelos.
- Vimos a una persona que tenía problemas con su coche.
- Fuimos a West Virginia.

(Translations for above: We went to a Hershey Bears hockey game. We found $2,000 in the park. We saw Big Foot. We went to a Beyoncé concert. We saw Zac Efran in Hershey, PA. We went to Disney World. We bought a Christmas tree. We went to Hawaii. We prepared the dinner. We visited our grandparents. We saw a person that had problems with his car. We went to West Virginia.)

Directions to play The Match Game:

Team Shake app

1. Divide the class into two teams. Every student needs a marker, mini-marker board, and an eraser. (I use the app Team Shake to randomly put my students in groups.)
 
2. Ask for 1 volunteer from each team. The volunteer sits in the front opposite his or her team (or somewhere in the room that the volunteer can NOT see what his team mates have written nor can the team mates see what s/he has written. I constantly needed to remind the students to not lay their boards down on their laps and to write with the board perpendicular to the floor.)

3. Read a sentence. I did a practice round with the sentence: Fuimos a Burger King. (We went to Burger King.) All students write what "we" did next. 
The members on each team were allowed to look at their teammates answers and (quietly) ask them how to spell their answers. But, the two volunteers needed to write their answers without any help. 

4. I asked Team A to show their answers. I read each of them and then the volunteer from Team A showed his answer. His team received a point for each member that matched his answer.

Note: ONLY the answers with the verbs spelled correctly received a point. (I did this because I allowed the students to ask their classmates for help. If the volunteer had his word spelled incorrectly, it did not count against his team since he had no help.) 

Another Note: The students had to write more than the verb. If they said "comimos (we ate)" that did not earn a point if it matched. They had to say "comimos hamburguesas" or "comimos comida". I was lenient on how closely they matched.

5. Then I turned to Team B and checked their answers. I alternated which team started each round.

6. I kept the score for each round on the board. I also wrote the verb that the volunteer had written on the board under the volunteer's name. That team could not use that word again in subsequent rounds, which forced them to use a variety of verbs and to be creative.

This game can easily be alternated to focus on something other than the nosotros form I used with students.

As my principal said earlier this week, the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas are when we earn our money, meaning it's a difficult time of the school year to teach.  Do yourself a favor and include a game that keeps the students in the target language and helps you make it to the New Year. 

Today's 145 minute class!

 Can you imagine teaching a high school class for a 145 minute block?  In other words, a 2 hour and 25 minute class. Thanks to the schedule changes to accommodate the state's seemingly never-ending barrage of state testing requirements, today's adjusted 2 hour class period turned into an unimaginable 2 hour and 25 minute class period.

I was fortunate in that the students in my class were absolutely amazing and kept any complaining to themselves, but I felt for them.  For part of the time, I tried out a new activity that actually worked well and mixed things up in the long class period. We did the following activity for 30 minutes.

Materials for the activity:
- A subscription to A-Z Reading.  (If you don't have this, find a children's book with visuals for each book that students are very familiar with and cover the written words.  As long as the words are covered, you can use a book written in any language.)
- Mini-whiteboards for each student
- dry erase markers and erasers

1.  Put the students in groups of four (NOT less!).  Some groups may have 5 but only 4 sentences are required from the group even if there are 5 in the group.

2. Project the wordless book onto the whiteboard.  

3.  Each group must write 4 sentences that relate to the picture. Students couldn't repeat a verb in the 4 sentences.  They were encouraged to help their teammates in order not to have any mistakes in their sentences.

 I used this activity in Spanish 2, so their sentences had to be in the past tense.

4. Turn to the 1st group and tell them to hold up their sentences.  They received one point for each correct sentence.  If there was an error, I took the whiteboad and showed it to the class.  If the class could find the error, the team that wrote it did NOT get the point for the sentence.  If the class couldn't find the error, I explained the correction and the team that wrote the sentence got a point for it, even though it was originally incorrect.

5. Turn to the next group and go over their answers.

6.  Check each group's answers; write their points on the board; then start the process over again with the next photo from the story.

7. When finished, students work independently to write the story as I clicked through the wordless book the 2nd time.

The reasons I liked this activity:

1. All the students were engaged: during writing, reading the answers the other teams had written, and looking for mistakes.

2.  It promoted teamwork. Students helped their classmates as they were writing their sentences. If an answer was incorrect, I stressed that it wasn't the fault of the one person that had that board, but rather that it was the responsibility of the team to check each others' answers.

3.  They became very good at finding the mistakes and that carried over into their own writing.

4. Since they had to write 4 sentences, it pushed them past the basic sentences.  
5. When I saw a correct sentence that was rather complicated for Spanish 2 level, I held that up as an example of an outstanding sentence.

6.  The students were more at ease during the individual writing session that followed the activity.

This activity could also be completed after reading a chapter from a novel or a short story that has illustrations or photos.
 
  

Silent Photo Story: Digital Storytelling with a Twist

Last week my students created a Silent Photo Story project that was inspired by this pin on Pinterest.  (The two students that made the project, below left, gave me permission to post their project.  You can find it at the end of the post and HERE.)

Before assigning the project to my students, I did a trial run by texting photos of a story, with the sentences written on an app on my ipad, to my daughter that was at her college tennis match.  (See one of the photos from the story below on the right.)  I searched for a way to post the photos on an app that would automatically advance each page of the story instead of having the photos listed vertically as on the Pinterest example.  The easiest user-friendly method I found for students to use is the Educreations app.

The purpose of the project was for my students to write in the past tense, include sentences that describe how someone felt about the actions of another person (the imperfect subjunctive), and for the majority of the creative aspect of the project to be completed outside of class time.

The Silent Photo Story project:

A. Requirements
   - Write a story in the past with a minimum of 10 sentences.
   - A minimum of 2 of the sentences must describe how someone felt about
     the actions of another person or about a situation.
   - Write each sentence on a mini-whiteboard. (I gave each student 2 
     markers, an eraser, and a mini-whiteboard to take home.)
   - Take a photo of you holding the marker board with the sentence. Your
     actions should match the sentence on the board.
   - E-mail the photos to your school g-mail account.

B.  Students had 4 days to complete the assignment.  I offered to proofread their sentences before they took the photos, but none of the students took me up on this offer.  (Next time, I will require the students to have a mini-conference with me before they complete the project.)

C.  The day it was due, I signed out the department i-pads.  The students accessed their photos through their g-mail, copied the photos to the i-pad, and opened the Educreations app.

D.  On the Educreations app, they uploaded one photo per page/slide.  Then they made a silent recording, pausing 3-4 seconds on each page.  (If you save the project before making the silent recording of each page, the app will only save the initial page of the project.)

E.  After the recording, they saved the lesson and followed my detailed instructions on how to post their projects directly on our class Edmodo page.  Those directions can be downloaded HERE.

F.  The following day in class, we sat in a circle (conversation style which means without desks) and read the stories. 





Note:  This project can also be done completely in class if you do not want to send the supplies home with the students.  One of my students completed his project at home, but it was in one location instead of several locations as in the example above.  His expressions perfectly matched the action in his story.  If I he gives me his approval to post it, I'll add it later.

100% Student Engagement with Reading Comprehension Questions

How often do you ask comprehension questions and the same 5 or 6 students answer the questions? The rest of the students are quite content to sit back and let the others answer for them.  

Today I wanted to have 100% student participation to answer comprehension questions after reading the last chapter of Robo en la noche. It's not often you can guarantee you have 100% student engagement in class, but this quick activity delivered that.  

1.  I read, or I had a student volunteer read, two or three paragraphs at a time to the students in Spanish.  Then I paused and asked the students questions about the text, either in Spanish or English.

2.  Each student had a mini-whiteboard and marker.  ALL students had to write the answer in English or Spanish, depending what I asked for.  As soon as they had written the answer, students held up their mini-whiteboard. It was not a race to be the first person to write the answer, but rather I wanted to ALL the students to write an answer.  I told them if they weren't sure of the answer, they could look at what the person next to them wrote, or they could look around the room to see what answers the others were holding up.  They could change their answers if they saw other answers were different than their answer. 

3. Then I waited until everyone was holding up an answer.  The affective filter was lowered because they had permission to copy someone else's answer, but interesting enough, many of the students that are usually not quick to answer or participate in class, searched for the answers themselves instead of taking the easy way out and copying the other answers. I wasn't expecting that, but it was a welcome surprise. 

Imagine, every student consciously writing the correct answer to a question about the text they just read. :-)

Immediately following the chapter review, the students took a 6 point quiz on information on the chapter.  Overall scores were much better and I assume it was because they couldn't zone out during the review.

Just another tool for the toolbox...

Group Activity with Mini-Whiteboards

The focus words for yesterday and a few new ones for today were: está preocupado, estudia, entiende, hace preguntas, and se esconde. I had also planned for está cansado to be one of the focus words, but it didn't fit well into the story created by the students today.

Yesterday I had enough time to define the words and complete PQA with the words. I added the additional vocabulary on the second day. The students helped to create a story and I circled each sentence and went back and reviewed when some students had questions or were unable to answer my questions. We retold the story with volunteers adding the next sentences.

After I felt comfortable that the students knew the sentences, I put the students in groups of 6 and gave each student a mini-whiteboard and a marker. Each student had to write ONE sentence from the story. Then, in their groups, they had to compare their sentences. If anyone had the same sentence as another group member, one of them had to write a new sentence. Then the students had to order their sentences on the whiteboards. After they had the sentences in the correct order, they had to each write one additional sentence on the whiteboard. It had to be logical and use vocabulary that they already knew.

Then the students mixed up the whiteboards and moved onto the whiteboards that another group of students wrote. With their new sentences, they had to put them in a logical order and as a group they had to decide on which 2 whiteboards to write the new sentences.

Finally, students took turns reading their stories and their classmates volunteered to translate their sentences. This activity included a large amount of repetitions for the students and most of them said they felt comfortable with the new vocabulary.

Rodrigo está preocupado

Hay un chico. Se llama Rodrigo.

Rodrigo está preocupado.

Hoy hay un examen en la clase de matemáticas.

Es un examen grande.

Vale 13,000 (trece mil) puntos.

Rodrigo tiene un problema.

Rodrigo está preocupado porque él no estudia matemáticas.

El no entiende matemáticas.

No entiende matemáticas porque no hace preguntas en la clase.

Cuando hay tarea en la clase de matemáticas, no hace la tarea.

No hace la tarea porque no la entiende.

No la entiende porque no estudia.

Y por eso (because of that) él está preocupado.

La clase de matemáticas empieza a las once.

Rodrigo está preocupado y no quiere ir a la clase de matemáticas.

La profesora de matemáticas se llama Sra. Wenger.

El no quiere hablar con la Sra. Wenger.

El no quiere ver a la Sra. Wenger.

A las once, Rodrigo no va a la clase de Sra. Wenger.

El va a la cafetería y se esconde en el basurero.

Pero, ahora Rodrigo tiene otro problema.

Hay un gato en el basurero.

Y a Rodrigo no le gustan los gatos.