Day of the Dead is almost here! Especially since the movie Coco my students are more excited than ever to learn about this holiday. I use the following activities as an introduction to Day of Dead in my Spanish 1 classes. My first goal is to make it abundantly clear to my students that Day of the Dead and Halloween are not the same thing, even though they are celebrated so close together. I want them to learn basic information about the holiday and then connect what they’ve learned to their own lives. I love that I can set these up as an assignment in Google and then have my…
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Discover Puerto Rico
We are nearing the anniversary of Hurricane María again this week and because many of my students are old enough to remember it, I like to spend some class time talking about Puerto Rico. Last summer, Puerto Rico came out with an 8 mini-episode series called Discover Puerto Rico with Lin-Manuel Miranda, which is great to use with students. The series is hosted by Lin-Manuel Miranda and each 3-5 minute clip highlights a different aspect of life in Puerto Rico. While the goal was to draw tourists back to the island after Hurricane María, it really is a celebration of life on the island. While most of the episodes are…
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Ready-made Culture Video Activities
As I plan for the upcoming year, it is more important than ever for me to have ready-made sub plans. My district is going to all virtual learning to start the year, but all the details haven’t been hashed out yet and we could change to blended or in person instruction beginning second quarter. Taking those things into account, I want to be prepared in case I’m not able to teach my classes, or at least as prepared as I can be, which is where my ready-made culture videos come in! My first few years teaching, I used a variety of hand me down travel DVDs about Spain and Latin…
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Guacamole Food Day
It’s a fact, students love food and in the world language classroom they frequently ask for food days. A few years back I began bringing in fruit typical to Latin America for my students. I began doing this because many of them indicated they hadn’t ever tried fruits like mangos or avocados as well as to move away from asking students to bring food from home. In my attempt to simplify the prep for a food day and get away from me having to spend so much time cutting up fruit, I started having my students make their own guacamole in class. Honestly, I was concerned the whole idea would…
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Spanish Guess Who?
This year I finally completed a goal I’d had for many years: to make my own Guess Who? game using important or famous people from Spanish-speaking and Latinx communities. One of my units centers on physical descriptions and I had already purchased the game boards, so all that was left to do was create new cards, which is easier than it sounds! It was without a doubt the most time consuming task of my teaching career, but so worth it! In previous years I had purchased several copies of the original game Guess Who? and the knockoff version Who is it? . There is literally no difference between the game instructions,…
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Tacos and Community
Tacos have been having their moment for quite some time now. You can find them on almost every restaurant’s menu and Taco Tuesday is serious business for lots of people. My students have not been immune to this craz, for years they’ve asked to go to the popular Mexican restaurant in town or suggested Taco Bell. My easy answer to both was: “Why go somewhere you’ve all already been?” Last year, I finally found the solution to their begging: walk to the smaller, lesser known Mexican grocery store and restaurant just three short blocks from school, something that easily fit into our block schedule. The establishment was newer to town…
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Singing in Spanish
My students love listening to music, it is almost like their headphones are another appendage. If they had their way, they would leave their headphones in all day, and now with the influx of AirPods and the like, it is even easier to just slip them on. In response to my students’ love of music, I play a song everyday in class. My department had been doing this long before I arrived and now with YouTube it is even easier to find songs! Asking Why? is an important question to ask about everything we do in our teaching practice. So the question: Why do we sing in Spanish class? is…
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Remote Instruction so far
6 weeks into remote instruction and I feel like I have hit a bit of a wall. This week saw the steepest drop off in students participation yet and my students seem to have hit their limit. I’m sure they feel a bit like me, the days have all run together and even though there’s supposed to be extra time in the day now since we can’t go out, I go to sleep at night thinking “Where did the day go?”. On top of that, I work in a low-income school, so there are so many other factors influencing my students’ lives that make it difficult to concentrate on online…
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Doki Descubre Videos
I am constantly on the lookout for authentic videos I can use with my students. As every world language teacher knows, there is a delicate balance to finding the perfect authentic resource that is both engaging AND understandable to students. I know I am not alone in saying I have spent hours and hours searching for the perfect authentic resource. One of my go-to video resources is the Discovery Kids series, Doki Descubre. They are short 1 minute videos centered on a dog named Doki, who teaches young kids about healthy lifestyle choices. Doki has become a staple of my Spanish 1 course and the students often ask for more…
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Extr@ and Edpuzzle
When I was in high school, the series Extr@ had just come out and I have vivid memories of watching it in both my French and Spanish classes. My classmates and I loved it, so much so in fact, that Sam even made it onto our French Club t-shirts! Now, over 15 years later, my colleague and I watch Extr@ every spring with our Spanish 2 students. Honestly, every year I get a little nervous and think “This will be the year when kids don’t like the show anymore,” but every year I know I was wrong when I hear them laughing and talking about the characters and story. Yes,…