Tag Archives: familia

Family Unit: Practice Vocabulary with #Instagram

Posted by Crystal Barragán in Projects, Technology and tagged with , , , ,

Instagr.am is fairly new to me, but not so much to many of my students. My students are testing all of this week, and I spent most of my weekend thinking about ways I could get them to do something easy over the course of the week. We’re still talking about la familia, and so far, we have:

Initially, the obligatory “family tree poster board project” was in the works, but I feel that we already accomplished describing our families with a Google Voice assignment. I’ve been pondering ways to incorporate Instagram — it’s just so EASY to snap a picture, add a caption, and talk about photos with your friends (or with your Spanish teacher)! On my way to work this morning, I figured my students would be excited to use Instagram as an extra credit activity, so I quickly drew up a rubric and introduced it to the group.

After locating me in the world of Instagram (@srtabarragan), students were tasked to take a minimum of 5 photos of their family members, and to add captions to each of their pictures in which they describe who’s featured in the photo and what their relationship is. We took a few pictures in class as an example and showed them on the projector. So far, it’s been a success! An INCREDIBLE amount of students have already sent in their pictures, and it’s been so much fun to have conversations with them completamente en español. Here are some examples:

20120423-175914.jpg

20120423-180018.jpg

20120423-180039.jpg

20120423-180058.jpg

Can’t wait to talk about these with my students! Can you think of any other uses for Instagr.am in the FL classroom?

Family unit: “Una historia de amor”

Posted by Crystal Barragán in Activities with Authentic Resources, Movie/Video Clips, Partner Activities and tagged with , , , , ,

I began a family unit with my students a few weeks back, and I somehow wanted to incorporate an idea gathered from a Twitter friend a few weeks ago. Kristy Placido mentioned during a recent #langchat an alternative to music cloze activities. Instead of a fill-in-the-blank lyric sheet, @placido suggests cutting up lines from a song and having kids arrange the lines in order as the song plays. What a cool idea (for more, visit Martina Bex’s ideas for cloze-less song activities)! I haven’t yet stumbled upon a song I’d want to use for my level one family unit, but I still wished to try this “cut/paste” idea with something else. I’m sure it’s not anything that hasn’t been done before, but here’s what we ended up doing:

First, we watched the intro to “UP: Una aventura de altura.”  The first 4 minutes or so include dialogue in Spanish, and the remaining 6 are without dialogue.

After silencing the few remaining snifflers in class, I asked for input about the characters in the story. ¿Cómo se llama el señor de la película? ¿Cómo se llama su esposa? ¿Cuántos hijos tienen? ¿Son padres? etc. Then, we broke into pairs, and I passed out the following:

WORKSHEET: Una historia de amor PREGUNTAS, Una historia de amor RESPUESTAS (Word format)

Students worked with a peer to cut out all of the words or phrases they’d need to answer the questions relating to the story. We ended up racing to see which pair could cut and paste the correct arrangement of words/phrases for each question the fastest! There’s less stress on the student to actually produce TL as they’re already provided with scrambled answers, but it’s certainly interesting to see them make sense of familiar and not so familiar structures. Overall, I think I had a pretty successful day. :)