Somewhere to Share

In September, I received a notification that my class had been selected for the National Geographic Educator Explorer Exchange 2018/2019. I was SO excited. My Nat Geo certification has had so many perks for my students!! In the “pairing” stage, I had to give some topics that I’d be interested in studying with my Explorer partner. I, of course, said Spanish and the environment!

Nat Geo paired me with Janni Benavides of the Colombian group Jacana Jacana (a jacana is a tropical bird FYI). Our job throughout the year was to stay in contact, teach each other new things, and create some type of a ‘deliverable’ for NatGeo.

From Janni, we learned a ton about the rainforest, the dry tropical forest, and the cloud forest. From us, Janni and her homeschool elementary students, learned Baby Shark, learned about the difference in the woods in IL in the fall and in the winter, and we recorded three of Jacana Jacana’s songs in English to help reach both Spanish and English speakers!

Janni was so patient as my students tried first to learn to play the songs on the guitar and then then on the Ukulele! She met us on Skype and told the class about her home, her favorite birds, and her students’ experience in the different community homes participating in the home school program!

My students were so excited as they got to use their new language to communicate with both Janni and her students! Not a contrived situation, a real world experience using the language!

We had our failures! Like when I forgot we had sprung forward and we got all set to Skype and Janni wasn’t online… because we were an hour early! We made due with Sr. Wooly that day…

These are our final video products. The kids did all the lyric translations and learned to play and sing the new lyrics to the tune of the original songs! Thank you, Nat Geo Education for such an amazing exchange and Janni for your patience and generosity with my seniors!

Titi cabeciblanco

Insectos

El bosque seco

Jacana Jacana’s music is a perfect authentic piece to add to your environmental unit because it is easy for students to understand and to sing! I’m hoping to be able to work on the cloud forest song with my incoming seniors in the fall! Just because the exchange is over doesn’t mean it has to end!!

Thank you so much for sharing my units with your students. When I use them in my classroom, it makes me so happy to see my own students connect with the environment, current issues, and the world beyond my classroom. When you share YOUR students’ reactions to the units, it brings me even more joy because I know that the more these students know about our changing planet, the more likely they are to become good stewards of what we have!

To show my appreciation, my store will be 25% off tomorrow (May 7) and Wednesday (May 8) using the code: GIFT4YOU Have you picked up my latest unit Basura cero yet? It will be a great price during the sale and it will help your students wrap their minds around living with less waste!

Have a great last few weeks! My seniors are in their last week now and they are set to record some videos for their Nat Geo explorer partners from the group Jacana Jacana! We have had an awesome year learning more about the rain and dry forests and the cloud forest! If you haven’t heard of Nat Geo certification, I talked about it here!

My juniors have nearly 3 full weeks left so we are ending with a virtual trip to the Galápagos with my newest reader 48 horas and some of my supplementary resources:

Guayaquil Ecuador

Comida y bebida ecuatoriana

Galápagos Islands

I’m working on a travel unit that I used with my 4s this year but would like to bring down to level 2, a unit about body image based around a music video, and a unit on clean energy worldwide! I wish I could make more hours in the day so I could get them done AND juggle end of the year craziness at school!

Thank you again for sharing my units with your students! Please share pictures on social media so I can see what you guys are up to!!

I had gone to Aldi with my good friend, a Sunday-post-church thing we do, to buy all of my healthy food for the week… You see, my resolution was to show love to myself this year… take time to get my eating, my finances, and my life in order! I had been really, really over extending myself!

When I got home and started to prep the fruits and veggies for the week, I ended up with this:

I felt terrible! If I was making this every Sunday (never mind all the ziplocs I was putting my fruits and veggies in), imagine the footprint I was leaving with my waste habits. So I started reading… I’m a sciency gal, it’s what I do. 🙂

I found lots of cool replacement things… Bamboo toothbrushes, reusable bags and bowl covers… compostable coffee pods…

But I knew I wanted to get my students thinking about their footprint as well. They LOVE units that challenge them to think (in Spanish) about the world and their place in it. Basura cero was born! We did the unit in Spanish 4 and they blew me away with their final assessments. So much of what is here is because of the way they responded as we studied the topic!!

My dear friend Nelly Hughes (check out her amazing products here) proofed the unit and now it is ready to share with everyone! I hope that together we can really start to raise awareness of the many ways to use less, waste less, and compost more!

Check out Basura cero here and if you’re looking to teach the Sustainable Development Goals look at my other units like:

Mar de plástico

Los años dorados

Dame dame chocolate

Viviendas del mundo (FREE)

Medicina o cura

Claus Encounter: An Arctic Crime (FREE)

Educarse para superarse

Comer para vivir o vivir para comer

Biodiversity and conservation

Water is Life

Orangutan in my bedroom

If you’re TOTALLY new to my units, I have an SDG SUPER DUPER bundle here that includes all of the above units (enough to fill almost a full semester!) at a discounted price!

When I read Kara and Megan’s post about the Kitipun Challenge yesterday, I knew that I wanted to make something to use with my students after break! I hadn’t heard it yet and I LOVE it. It has been stuck in my head since I listened the first time!

Thank you Kara and Megan for sharing with me and here are some resources to share if everyone else want to use the song too!!!

I had the best time starting this predictive 2 day unit with my Spanish 4 class today! It is a different way to do a movie talk… you do all the talking before watching the short!

THE SWITCH ACTIVITY

I started by doing an anticipation guide type activity with screenshots and predictions. I love getting repeated exposure to the future tense by trying to predict what will happen in books and short stories!

Next, I used some screenshots from the film short to create a backstory to connect the students with the film before we watch tomorrow. I asked them questions about the images until we knew who the man was, what was in the boxes, and why he was in the room with the boxes in the first place.

We actually had a little time at the end of the hour so I asked them to draw what they thought would happen when he touched the button on the bottom of the box.

Tomorrow we will make a doodle of what ACTUALLY might be in the box, not just our class story. We will watch the video for the first time, and we will predict what might happen next. I’m using it in level 3 so I will have them create a really great story to tell what happens after the… Oh wait, no spoilers. 😉

I hope you enjoy the unit. I love seeing their creativity when we predict!

When I saw this little film short, I knew it was the perfect little mini unit for predicting with students! Why predict with them? An advanced level speaker has good control of the three major time frames: Present, past, and future! If I don’t start making predictions in context early, how will they have enough exposure to the future tense to independently produce it?? Research says that worksheets and conjugations don’t do it… so we do it through engaging story!

Over the two days, students will spend a lot of time with the story before they ever see the video! They’ll start with a predictive activity called “The Handwriting on the Wall.” In this activity, they will look at screenshots from the video and decide which of two predictions (there is one sheet in the future tense and one using ir + a + infinitive) is correct. Discuss their predictions on day 1 and revisit this activity on day 2 after they’ve seen the video to see how they did!

They’ll follow this by looking at 5 screenshots from the story and answering teacher questions to build the backstory of the protagonist.

On day 2, they will start by reviewing the backstory that they wrote. I love sharing the stories that other sections of the same class created. Kids LOVE to hear their peers ideas and it is a super sneaky way to get repeated exposure!

They’ll follow this up by guessing what is in the boxes they have seen in the video. After giving them a few minutes drawing time, encourage students to share their ideas with the class.

At long last, they’ll watch the video (and hopefully be shocked) and then compare with the predictions they made on day 1.

Finish the class period by having them create a predictive epilogue using the included sentence frames!

It is a ton of great exposure to future tense and a great alternative to the traditional movie talk!

Hope you enjoy the activity! I’d love to hear how it goes. THE SWITCH

When I taught from the textbook, I taught grammar level by level. What I mean is that I taught present tense verbs, some commands, stem changers, and present progressive in level 1 then abandoned those verbs for reflexives, pretérito and imperfecto in level 2 and on and on…. when we finished chapter 2 and had memorized every conjugation of every reflexive verb in the Spanish language (that may be an exaggeration), we moved on and never talked about them again. There just wasn’t time! it was like I was at one of those hotdog eating contests and I was cramming everything in as fast as I could… most kids weren’t pro eaters and couldn’t keep up!

One of the things I have loved about building my own Scope and sequence is that I can use whatever verb forms are appropriate for what my students want to talk about without fearing they are doing grammar that is too hard!

This week my Spanish 2s are doing a Señor Wooly song, No voy a levantarme. Grammar is really just a chunk of language that i can give my students to communicate what they want, need, or are interested in… so I didn’t teach them verb charts and give them all the verbs they might ever use… the ones we don’t do today will come up at other times and it will give me a chance to revisit these! Our chunks came directly from the song! Me despierto, me levanto, me duermo, me ducho… we had a lot of PQA (personalized questions and answers as a discussion of class habits) to get repetitions of the structures and we watched the video, sang the song, and did the embedded readings available with a Pro subscription!

On day 1, we did the lyric Cloze sheet from the extras and we picture talked the images from the video’s slideshow of stills. It let me expose them to our target structures in the 3rd person form and PQA to get the 1st and 2nd person too!

Today, we did the viewing guide (did Justin sing this in the video) from the extras packet, the novice level embedded reading and a little FVR.

Tomorrow we will tell a class story and I will go back to some PQA as we use the structures to discuss a character that will have similarities to Justin from the video! On Thursday, using this word cloud (the dashes are there to keep the me attached), they will do a 20 minute timed write about their habits and routines.

On Friday, they will get a ton of great exposure to the song structures as they tackle some of the “nuggets” that accompany it!

Essentially, we are doing a grammar lesson, right?? I mean I am selecting verbs that I know are part of a family… but in their eyes it is just a lot of talking and smiling as we learn about how late Bella gets up or how Sydney brushes her teeth 4 times a day! But I keep going back to the same few, making sure they’re not just memorizing things they can’t use… they’re really starting to acquire and produce them correctly!

Don’t feel like grammar in a song, a book, an article, or an authentic resource means you have to stop everything and teach a grammar unit! It isn’t a hotdog eating contest…take little nibbles over and over and they’ll eventually end up digesting the whole concept… and everyone will be able to do it in their own time!