In an upcoming episode of the CI Diaries Podcast, you will hear from my dear friend Martina Bex of The Comprehensible Classroom about the value of follow up activities. I love reading with my students, especially longer texts, but I’ve gone through a lot of different ideas for how to follow up those readings! Here are some things we have done this week as we read in my Spanish 2-4 classes.

In Spanish 2, we are reading my book Bianca Nieves. The teacher’s guide has so many options for follow ups that I feel like I can pick from low energy to high energy, low prep to high prep every chapter! My favorite this week was Cupside Down. It is SUPER LOW PREP. All you need is a set of comprehension questions and a set of cups in different colors (I have four colors so I can divide the class into 4 groups) (also, this is an Amazon affiliate link… you can use ANY set of cups in 4 colors).

Groups are assigned a color and a direction (for more explicit instructions, visit the post linked above). Groups are given a white board, markers, and an eraser (these are the ones I got last year). Teams of students answer a question on the white board and each group that answers correctly receives an extra cup. After they’ve placed their cups, they have 30 seconds of madness to try to flip the other team’s cups the wrong direction while trying to keep theirs in the RIGHT direction. Initially, I was naming the winner the group that ENDED with the most cups in the correct direction. Lately, I’ve been tallying them every round and the winner is the team with the most rounds won!

For a MEDIUM prep activity in Spanish 3, we tried a game we learned from Nelly Andrade-Hughes in the teacher’s guide for La princesa y el guerrero by Marta Yedinak. (Check out her amazing Cuéntame podcast). I call it medium prep not because it is a lot of work, you just need to get some supplies in advance. I am going to show you what we did from the teacher materials of the reader, but it is easy to recreate this game for any text/unit of study.

First, I bought these cups and pom-poms from Amazon. Then I printed the “basquetbolito” game board. If you do not speak Spanish, basquetbolito is just “tiny basketball”. Other than those little bits of prep, I just needed a set of approximately 20 comprehension questions about the story.

I put my students in teams of 3-4. They set up their game board by placing a cup on each circle. Each player got 3-4 pom pom basketballs to shoot. The teams had a copy of all the comprehension questions on the front of a page, and the answers on the back.

Taking turns as they moved around the team, players would choose a question to answer. If they were correct, they were allowed to shoot a pom pom at the baskets.

Two tricks to play:
Students can shoot at any basket, but once a basket has been used 3 times, it has to be turned mouth down.
Students receive the points listed under the basket, so some are worth a lot more than the others.

And for a HIGH prep activity… I often dodge away from anything that requires a lot of cutting… but this one was worth it and the kids did most of the cutting for me the day before. This activity is from the Princess and the Warrior guide as well! It is called “The Last Word” and comes to the guide via Cynthia Hitz.

Basically, student groups of 4 have two decks of cards. One has sentences with the last word listed separately, the other has words that COULD BE the last word of the sentence. After we read the chapter, students played this game as a way to re-read significant moments in the text.

First, I copied the grid with the 16 sentence cards. Each group got 2 copies of these sentences (total of 32 cards when cut). The sentence was typed at the top, then there was a dotted line (you can see it if you look closely at the picture), then the correct “last word”. I also copied the grid with 16 last word cards. Each group got 4 sets of these words (64 cards when cut).

Teams dealt 8 word cards to each player. They placed the sentence cards and draw pile for word cards face down on the floor. One player drew a sentence card and read down to the dotted line (they do not read the correct last word). The other teammates competed to be the first to call out the correct last word. If they had the card and it was correct, they got to keep the “match” of cards. Any player who made a match drew from the word pile to keep a constant set of 8 cards in hand.

In all follow up activities, I am a fan of giving tiny prizes. It can be anything from a tootsie roll (this bag is so long lasting), to a sticker (mine are currently hooked on these scratch and sniffs), to something totally free like high or low fives.

Hope you find something you’re excited to take back to your own classroom! We’re just trying to make it through these last days of the semester so we can enjoy our holiday break… and gamified follow ups that aid acquisition are our FAVORITE!