New post-AP-Film class --> First unit: Diarios de Motocicleta

 For a variety of reasons, I am so excited for this school year! It is my third year at my current year (after 18 years at the same school 💚 and 24 years in public) and I am excited to be teaching and creating a new course for our post-AP (or heritage speakers or native speakers or Intermediate High students). This is the description of the course:

This course is for students with an Intermediate High or above proficiency level in Spanish. Through authentic films, students will learn about a variety of cultural products, practices and perspectives from a variety of Spanish speaking countries. In addition, students will learn about the history, politics, arts, and music of a variety of Spanish speaking countries. This class will be conducted entirely in Spanish. Assessments will be widely varied and will be in the three modes of communication. Discussion based classes will be frequent and will be student-led.

I use lots of films in AP, but I have always wanted to develop this course. In particular because I won't have the pressure of test prep ---> writing argumentative essays, teaching multiple choice strategies, etc.

For the first unit, I am going to use a movie that I haven't used in years: Diarios de Motocicleta. When I was in Segovia on a fab PD experience, one of the teachers - Justine! - reminded me of it. While the film has a few issues and a couple of scenes that I will skip, I think it will be an excellent, nuanced film to start the course... and I LOVE Gael García Bernal (we will also be doing a unit with También la lluvia, an all time fave!).

I have created resources here (still a bit of a work in progress): unit packet and slideshow that walks through the unit. I got a lot of help from ChatGPT throughout - saves SO MUCH TIME!!

Some things that the unit includes:

• Preguntas Esenciales
• Assessment ideas with rubrics
• See-Think-Wonder activities
• Word-Phrase-Sentence
• Tea Party with two versions of character descriptions (ChatGPT!), Quizlet to review and a Canvas Quiz (in the Commons) to review them as well
• I LOVE this activity and so do students (and teachers :) ) Thanks Rita Barrett and AnneMarie Chase!
• A Google Map with all the places
• A biography of Che (ChatGPT!) and a Quizlet to review
• PQA to do before each of the SIX parts of the movie
• After each section of the movie, students will write AND share the next day with a partner/group:
• Un momento impactante y/o importante
• Una cita importante (they can re-watch to find this)
• Una pregunta y/o comentario que tienes
• Una conexión a tu vida
• Una predicción
• I am sure I will add more for something after each part of the movie, like: put in order, who said it, who did it, questions and answers, etc. - stay tuned!
• In the slideshow, I have also included a couple of ¿Héroe o villano? videos about Che.