In Spanish 4, we began the year with Huellas 2.3, La biodiversidad y la conservación. For our second unit, we are moving back to unit 2.1, but for our woods, the best time to go out and explore is late August or early September. If we wait too long, the kids can’t find anything fun to show in their own final assessments!

Our unit began with posters. I wanted students to move beyond the basics in this unit, so I had them create a mind map of all the things they already knew about nature/the outdoors. They worked for about 30 minutes creating their posters and then we hung them all on the wall. These words, then, became only background words for the rest of the unit. They could use them to help expand how much they could say about the topic, but they had to be just the base, the actual structure of their writing needed to come from new material they were acquiring.

After our posters, we built the knowledge we needed to confidently discuss the similarities and differences between the rainforest and the woods in Salem where we live. We went on video tours provided by our guide Cris and we took a walk through the woods together where I taught a lesson comparing our woods to what we saw from Cris’s trip to the rainforest.

We sent Cris some questions and he sent us some replies (this is the most engaging part of the unit for all the kids). Nothing makes them more eager to understand an authentic resource than having it made just for them, so if you have native speaker friends who would help you with a little project like this, ask if they’d mind chatting with your students!

Q&A with Cris

Our assessment in this unit is two-fold. We write and we speak. The writing can be a pamphlet, an essay, a letter to me or to Cris, or a magazine article. In their writing, they can talk about everything they’ve learned about our forest and the rainforest, they can compare and contrast the two, or they can discuss problems that are affecting the rainforest (focus on the Amazon from our unit). The speaking is a thank you back to Cris for his willingness to work with us! They give him a tour of the woods here in Salem and we choose a winner and send it to him!

Winning Tour

This is always a hit in my room and it becomes a topic they can confidently discuss (including climate, seasons, topography) in a cross-curricular mode!

This year, we were waiting for Cris to be able to reply to our questions when he returned from a tour so we had a half-day extra between this unit and the next. I decided to have them re-make their early posters with their new knowledge. I would do this again next year! It was so much fun for them to see how much they have learned and to feel so much more confident about what they’re writing. It was good evidence too for my teacher portfolio of pre-post test style data!

If you have done Huellas 2.3, we’d love to know how it went for you! Cris is trying to get some additional videos for us (and for unit 2.3 users) this weekend when he’s touring Gatún lake. He thinks he might be able to find some monkeys!