TPRS Year 3 - Story - telephone

So I was trying to find something to help go over some structures involving, "couldn't" or "can't" in Spanish and I came across this story script from Jim Tripp that I bought from Ben Slavic's site.  I really think there are some gems in this book.

The basic idea in Jim's version was that a person called someone and that person hung up the phone.  I adapted the story from Jim Tripp's book.  But the structures I used were the following:

• Contestó el teléfono    s/he answered the phone
• No podía entender / hablar              
      s/he couldn’t understand / speak
• colgó el teléfono     s/he hung up the phone 

* I was also trying to get more repetitions of llamó (s/he called) since that was in our weekend chat yesterday.

I tried it out in both Spanish 1 & 2.  Of course in Spanish two I could focus on some different things than with Spanish 1.  And of course the language was more complex at times and we could review more words.  But the general idea was the same.

I recently had acquired a telephone as well and I thought it would be the perfect prop.

So I asked if there was a boy or a girl.  We went over all of that.  I then asked where he/she was.  Then what was he/she doing (had to translate that... since we hadn't used it too much).  Then we had each person doing something in the place and suddenly, they heard a phone.  The phone rang, they looked for it, found it, and answered it.  Someone called them.  They couldn't understand.  They hung up.  On a different day, someone else called, they couldn't understand because they couldn't speak whatever language was being spoken and they hung up.  Most classes got to two days for sure.  A few classes got to three days.

In one of my classes, a student told me, "Thanks for making class so fun today."  To which I replied, "No.  Thanks to your class.  You guys are the ones who made it interesting."

All in all a blast of a day!  My students and I sure needed it.

*Note to self* Props can really help a story.