The end of the year is such a blessing and a curse. We can see so much progress in what students have learned, we have gotten to know our classes so well… and then spring fever hits, senioritis hits, juniors with peri-senioritis hits… and all the wheels fall off. Getting meaningful work done in the last 3-4 weeks can be tough. But we don’t want to resort to doing no meaningful work!!

I am a Spanish teacher and I have a carousel of readers that we read together as a class and also a whole bookshelf of reader sets that we are not using for class reads currently.

By April, my seniors are starting to check out for real. They have already completed their STAMP testing in Spanish and they’re thinking of all the other dual credit finals they’re going to be taking the first week of May. I wanted to come up with an idea that let them stay connected to Spanish content, but also considered all of their senior field trips, skip days, and sports leaving early!

I started doing this about 7 years ago, but it has evolved in the last 2 years to be called Anything but a Slideshow… because given the choice, they’ll do the bare minimum making a boring slideshow. I didn’t know how it would go, but two years in, I am so happy with the results. Don’t get me wrong, I had a couple of groups who were clearly unprepared… but the vast majority knocked this out of the park.

This year students chose to read one of these books: Dreamer by Linnae Salvati, 48 horas by me, La lucha by Melisa Lopez, or La Llorona by Katie Baker. To best plan for the reading, I started by jumping to our seniors’ last day (yesterday, May 11). That was the target date for presentations. Most books are 10-14 chapters, so I counted backward through the calendar to give them 10 solid reading days. We do watch a show every Thursday, so I had to figure that in on the count. After I had a start date, I marked the Monday of that week as “book pairing day”. Students did a survey (it was like a book sampling, they read the back cover blurb from each of the possible choices) and ranked the books in the order of their interest in reading them. I offered 6 options, but the students all picked the same 4 books, so I ended up with two groups reading 48 horas in one class and 2 groups reading La Llorona in the other class. No big deal!!

I gave groups a calendar (click here to sign up for my mailing list and grab the resource folder for my senior choice read – it will come as an email) and had them plan what chapters they’d read each day. They had so many sports and field trips, it was important that they manage their time well this time of year.

Groups read daily with missing students catching up as soon as they got back or taking a book along with them while they were gone. (In 7th hour between illnesses and athletes, we averaged about 35% attendance for the end of April and all of May!!)

Groups built in time for a day at the end to plan and execute ideas for their project. Friday, May 8 was our project work day. A few groups did a little final reading, but most got their ideas together to present yesterday, May 11!

The projects included a silent film, a fully Hollywood style movie, a sock puppet show, poster presentations, comic strip presentations, a rap, a series of memes to represent different events in the story, a gamified order the events presentation, and a re-tell of the story using a full set of press on nails as their canvas!!

I couldn’t have asked for a more FUN way to end the year. Every presentation was different, and nearly all of them were a lot of fun and got a lot of good laughs and applause! This was a great way to honor the senioritis while still keeping the students moving forward in their language journeys! Let me know if you try it out! I’d love to see what your class comes up with!