I’m using the reader Vector with my Spanish 3 class and we just read about Dengue Fever.  I am a huge science nerd so the whole mosquito/vector part is the big reveal for me!  I wanted to take a day to learn a little about the tropical mosquitos that cause illnesses like malaria (Anopheles) and yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, zika (Aedes aegypti).  We talked about Culex pipiens that causes West Nile Virus, and about Aedes albopictus the Asian tiger mosquito.

As an authentic, interpretive reading, I broke the class up into groups of 5 and gave each group a stack of  Infographics for this Mosquito Activity that I printed from the Internet. On Thursday, we have “Prime Time” at school… classes start an hour later so that we can have our weekly faculty meeting.  This cuts out our homeroom and shortens each class by 6 minutes.  M-W and F I have 48 minute classes but this day, I had 42.

I gave about a 5 minute little presentation on the mosquitos.  I showed these pictures:

We described the mosquitos together, I told them some diseases they caused, and we discussed the symptoms of those diseases.  I told them they are tropical mosquitos and then we talked about the mosquitos that we see closer to home.

The next 15 minutes, they had time to read the infographics as a team.  There were so many cognates and so much familiar vocabulary (after our study of Medicina o cura in March) that they had no trouble reading them.

The last 20 minutes, the groups had to give me the infographic sheets and create their own from the information that they read.  They did GREAT work!