Let’s Chat about Charlala

The pandemic left me scrambling to fill my class time with just the basics. I needed to cut away some of my very favorite things just to be able to cover some content. Let’s face it, we went through a pretty miserable couple of years.

I had forgotten how much I LOVED Charlala! I was at the ICTFL (Illinois Council on Teaching of Foreign Languages) fall conference in October and I ran into the founder, Chris. It was the little jolt my mind needed to get Charlala back into action in my classroom!

In two years, there have been some upgrades… so I KNOW there are more amazing things for me to find as we explore this year, but I wanted to share what we have already done with you! The holiday season is in full swing so you’re going to need a few tricks up your sleeve!

First: When we did our Spanish 3 predictive unit to practice the future unit (The Switch), I had them use Charlala to do the Doodle Noodle activity predicting what was in the box. They enjoyed this so much more than doing it on paper and it was much easier to see the drawings on Charlala than AirPlaying our iPads!

Another day, when I had just 10 minutes left in class, I had them join a Charlala draw room and I gave them all a sentence to draw. They drew their images and we selected our four favorites. We were able to fit two drawings in our 10 minutes.

On another day, we had finished a reading and I used a “set” (a pre-made set of sentences) to play a guessing game with the students. They each see a sentence on their own iPad and draw a picture of what the sentence says. When our draw time is over, students have to look at each picture and select the sentence that describes it from a group.

I love charlala.com because you can prepare a “set” and use it in class as part of your lesson plan OR if you have a little extra time at the end, you can just open a draw room and give students oral prompts! And they LOVE drawing with it.

I can’t wait to explore the new story feature! Hope you are able to use the (limited) free features to get you through these next few crazy weeks!

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