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.