Starting off anew in Spanish 1... Personalization, ICR, Story Listening and OWI

Day 2 Spanish 1:

I don't often teach Spanish 1, but I am teaching it this semester. I have 24 students the last block of the day. I am excited to share some of the things that I am going to do for the first few weeks.

I read (and reread) A Natural Approach to Stories and I am going to implement some of the techniques in that book. This is what I have used during the first few days (and what I plan on using for the first 1-3 weeks):

• Personalization - talking in Spanish about the students in the classroom - Students filled out the Anne Matava questionnaire that is in the Appendix of the book A Natural Approach to Stories. I will talk about 2-4 students each day (in Spanish) and then give a quiz about what I said. The quiz is very basic. Sometimes I will say facts in English and they have to write the name of the student or I will say true or false statements in English.
• ICR - the Interpretive/Interpersonal Communication Rubric - I am using the rubric (Anabelle Allen's version foundhere) to set expectations and also to assess the students. This will be a big part of their grade for the first few weeks. Students self-assessed on the first day. This is a really good way to set expectations and explain what they need to do to be successful in the class!
• Story Listening - There is a great explanation of it in the Appendix of the book, but this post explains more about it. Instead of starting with familiar folktales and/or stories, I decided to start with stories based on music videos (and probably some cortometrajes). So, how is this different than Movie Talk? Well, the students don't see any images from the video during the process and there aren't as many questions during this process, as students are mostly listening. Also, there are not necessarily targets. After they have listened to the story, they will get the reward of seeing the music video... which is in itself a cultural product that shows more cultural products, practices and perspectives. It will also serve as a good brain break in our 85 minute class period!
• On Day 1, we did Story Listening with a story about the song "Corazón" by Maluma. Listening and comprehending a story in Spanish, followed by watching the video and hearing that music on the first day of class was a positive way to start the class!
• This bundle (on TPT) has SIXTEEN  BASIC Spanish 1 scripts for the Story Listening. It also has a wide variety of follow-up activities, including short quizzes
• OWI - One Work Image - If you haven't seen this in action in a classroom, I highly recommend watching it. I went to the Express Fluency conference and it was very helpful to see Tina Hargaden do this process. There are lots of videos on Youtube of this process. My French teacher colleague also did it throughout last semester and had lots of success. I am looking forward to doing a lot of this during these first few weeks! I hope to share more about that here soon. Update: Here is our first OWI: Ricardo El Balón.
• I will also still use a lot of  the stories and activities that I did two years ago when I taught Spanish 1. (See here and here.)

La Belleza de la Cultura Colombiana

I am starting this unit: "Las Bellezas y Las Dificultades de Colombia" next week in my Cultura y Civilización class (Spanish 4/5/6/7). I originally started the unit with a story based on the song/music video "Pescaíto", then added La Niña... but now I have added a fantastic introduction piece to Las Bellezas de Colombia.

After seeing this song/music video promoting tourism in Colombia, "Sabrosura" (thanks to David Talone on the Facebook IFLT/NTPRS/CI Teaching Facebook group, Arianne Dowd, and Sharon Birch too), 

I went down a rabbit hole on the website for the tourism advertising campaign called: Colombia: Tierra de La Sabrosura. There are a TON of fantastic resources on that site and I compiled a whole bunch of them in the presentation below. Most of the language is taken right from the website, but some of it I wrote. I will use this to introduce my students to La Belleza de la Cultura Colombiana. Click here if you want to make a copy and/or use it. And here is a basic cloze activity for the song.

I am sharing all of this for FREE, but if you think this (or anything else that you got here for free) is useful and has saved you some time, feel free to give back here in Radiohead style (click here to see what I mean by Radiohead style). 

La Niña... más recursos

As I wrote about recently, I am planning on using some episodes of La Niña, a Netflix series, in my Cultura y Civilización course (definitely a show for upper levels). So, this morning on my surprise snow (really ice) day, I went down a rabbit hole of links from la Agencia para la Reincorporación y la Normalización.

I learned so much about the Reintegration program that is seen in La Niña! I also created some Interpretitve Reading and Interpretive Listening activities (free here) and an Edpuzzle with the following authentic resources. After doing these activities and these, students should be ready to watch La Niña, with much more knowledge about the context! Feel free to use them and adapt! If you see any mistakes, please let me know and I will fix them ASAP.

Below is part of an infografía, click here to view the entire thing.

I am sharing all of this for FREE, but if you think this (or anything else that you got here for free) is useful and has saved you some time, feel free to give back here in Radiohead style (click here to see what I mean by Radiohead style).