My Spanish 2 class started the year in unit 10 of Martina Bex’s Somos curriculum. We are just starting unit 13, El chico del apartamento 512. It’s been SO MUCH FUN to revisit Somos 1. I haven’t had a level 1 class since the 2016-17 school year, but the pandemic set us back quite a bit so I’m getting to walk down memory lane with some favorite Somos stories… and this is one! I just love the song, the story, the way the kids laugh…
BUT… I’m still fighting this cold and I didn’t know if I could contain the circus of getting all the actors I’d need to act this one out… so I thought about it and decided to try a new activity, I’m going to call it All A-Board.
I grabbed my mini white boards and just started drawing things I’d need to talk about as I told this story. Since this is directly tied to the song, I knew it would be much more a story TELL than ASK.
As I told the story, I picked up the white boards I needed to use as visual aids. If one of the men asked Jenny on a date, I grabbed his board and the ¿Quieres salir conmigo? board. If Jenny was in her apartment, I grabbed the Jenny board and her apartment board (503).
After we had told the whole story, I had the students face each other to play Back ‘Atcha (another amazing Cindy Hitz game). We used the All A-Board boards so that the story was fresh in everyone’s mind and MAN did they do a good job remembering story details this way!
I’m not positive we followed Cindy’s EXACT Back ‘Atcha rules but we took turns telling one thing that happened in the story. If team A made a correct statement, it was team B’s turn. Team B had to make a different statement. Any repeated or wrong statements resulted in a strike. Three strikes meant the other team would win! We played 15 minutes in both Spanish 2 hours and neither team won! Only ONE team had a strike and it was for a repeat!
I loved how they would lean out and look me dead in my eyes to make their statements. They were so confident!
These little boards took me about 5 minutes to draw and I will DEFINITELY do this again. It helped with comprehension, it helped ME stick to the story structures, and it helped the students recall the events of the story. I didn’t mean to make up some new big thing in my classroom this morning… honestly, I was feeling pretty awful and just trying to salvage the ability to sell this story to the kids… but this turned out to be a homerun!
