Thursday, November 4, 2010

Día 54 - Class-Create-a-story

Today we had our song day which has become a strange phenomenon in many of my students.  I really should have incorporated more music in previous years.

In one class after the song, somehow we got through the song portion rather quickly and then we had a good 15 minutes left of class.  Now if we would have had 5 minutes or so left I wouldn't mind as much letting the students sit there because there's not a lot one can do in 5 minutes.  But I thought that we could try an activity I thought up the other day.

The idea was to give the students the structures (if they needed the linguistic support) and then to go around the class and each person comes up with a line for a story.

Now, it went something like this (for the first try).
Había una chica.
   There was a girl.
La chica se llamaba Nancy.
   The girl called herself Nancy.
Nancy fue a México.
    Nancy went to Mexico.
Nancy vivía en Florida.
    Nancy lived in Florida.
Nancy fue hacia una cantina.
    Nancy went toward a bar.
porque no le gustaba Florida.
   because she didn't like Florida.
Quería tener 15 gatos.
   Nancy wanted to have 15 cats.
Vio un pingüino.
    Nancy saw a penguin.
Quería vivir en México.
    Nancy wanted to live in Mexico.

Granted I hadn't established boundaries for the story.  Either way it was fun for the students to show off to their peers and talk about someone else.  And the amazing thing is the language just comes out.  They're not as self conscious like in previous years with production.  It's awesome.

In the future, I might establish the problem first or have kind of a problem and let the first student establish the problem and then we can tell the story to try and resolve the problem.  But for a first try, it filled the time nicely and we were able to further practice the language.

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