A couple of weeks ago, I released my long planned, but slowly built unit on Lucha libre. It is written for upper level students and, while it’s not an official part of the Huellas curriculum, it is a “Huellas Freeform” unit that can stand in for any traditional Huellas unit or fill in time in a program using Huellas for 3 years.

It’s a brand new unit, so it was my first time using it in class, and we had fun. As a matter of fact, we ended up adding an optional extension based on student feedback!

Today we did our assessment, little luchadores. Students got a template for a paper luchador (thank you to Nelly Hughes for the amazing template). They designed a luchador that represented their personality… the masks they wear both figurative and literal. 🙂

They worked on their wrestlers Wednesday and presented them today, Friday, so they had a day between if they needed to add finishing touches. (Don’t be surprised if 80% wait until presentation day to figure out how to fold them hahaha… I had to add a 10 minute “wrestler wrangling” period at the beginning of class to get them together).

If you’re on Instagram or Facebook, you can see a reel of them doing their presentations! They KILLED it.

So here are the basics:

We completed our full unit of study, so we had tons of knowledge about Lucha libre.

There were options for written or oral presentations at the end of the unit, I let them vote, they picked the oral presentations.

They all designed a little luchador on the template that represented their “verdadera yo”. Each luchador had details specific to the student who created it.

We reviewed things we could say about our luchadores to keep the conversation going: key verbs, descriptive words, words for patterns they might have used in their decorations

They presented “speed dating style”. I set them up in groups of four and they took turns sharing their luchador. Each person presented for 2 minutes.

I graded as they presented. I had up to 6 groups in one class, but I had no trouble standing in the middle of the group hearing everyone during the 2 minutes. I didn’t hear the entire presentations but I was able to hear them each for 20 seconds total as I just tuned my ear in to different groups throughout the timer.

It was low stress for them, easy for me to grade, and the luchadores were adorable!