Me cortaron me el pelo - Simple Story + authentic text (past + present)

Past tense for spoken class story.

I found this years ago and experimented with it my 3rd year of using TPRS. See how I used it back then.

This year for Spanish 1, I thought it would be a fun little story to experiment with to further reinforce "can" or "can't".  Some of my students still seemed to be having difficulty with those.

Now I am not saying these are the best structures in the world. Maybe my original ones were better. But I am always experimenting and pushing the language of my students each year to achieve greater acquisition (if that is possible).

still from music video (31 Minutos)

My first years I probably babied them way too much and now I want to see how far we can really get.

And there is this song I fell in love with years ago called: Me cortaron mal el pelo.  It's from a TV show in Chile called 31 Minutos.  And the song sort of has a Sponge-Bob musical quality to it.

The show is pretty crazy. Definitely not comprehensible for my Spanish 1 or 2 students most of the time. But every once in awhile, there is a gem I can use. This is one of those times. So I revised an old story I made years ago and tried it out with my Spanish 1 or 2 students.

So my structures were:

• antes de ir a ___
• before going to... (past)
• debía ir a...
• s/he should go to (past)
• le cortó mal el pelo
• s/he cut his hair badly (past)

And from there we listened to the song as a warm up each day.

And here's the plan if you wanted to see it!

Let me know if you end up using it in your classes and how it goes or what you would recommend!

Comercial - Me voy de casa

So this year in Spanish two, I have certain vocabulary points I need to hit for a unit and I have wanted to use this commercial for years.

I decided to do a lot of TPR first with my classes to build up their understanding of some words for sure.

So this folder gives you all of the things that I used with the Argentine commercial: Personal - Me voy de casa. (Folder Contains: screenshots from movie, TPR, warm ups, readings, Movietalk slides, instructions & reflection)

Commercial:

Here is more or less what I did.

Music - using songs more than once

I got this idea from Kristy Placido in an online conference through tprspublishing a few years back.

Basically I used to just show a song for one day of the week and we would listen to it and do a cloze activity. It was the favorite day of a lot of my students.  We would go over the lyrics and listen to it various times. But there was never really much of an extension activity.

I don't see a huge problem since my most important goal was to expose them to new things. The songs could have similar and/or different perspectives and we could have a quick talk in L1 or TL about them as needed. Since storytelling revolves around high frequency structures, this is a great activity since many songs will have some part with comprehensible language that we can see later creep up in stories.

I also noticed many of the kids downloaded the songs that year.

TPRS year 5 - Mi mascota es _____.

Here's a video/song to get you to talk about your students' pets and also get a little brain-break and music all in one.

While it might seem silly, yes I would probably do this in a high school class because in my opinion, high school students are often nostalgic for those activities they used to do in classes as kids.


Step 1: PQA (Personalized Questions and Answers)

Depending on the level of class, here are some Spanish 1 questions I would consider asking to practice some basic structures... in upper levels, you could use more complicated language:

¿Quién tiene una mascota?
¿Cómo se llama?
¿Es pequeño/a, grande o mediano?
¿Es bonito/a o feo/a?
¿De qué color es?
¿Te gusta tu mascota?
(maybe target action word you could ask about: what does it eat? / why is it special? /etc)

TPRS year 4 - Commercial - Jimmy Dean - "Listo"

So my wife and I have a MOHO digital antenna.  Pretty neat in and of itself.  But we somehow got a Spanish channel suddenly through it in the KC area!  So we're pumped.  Well, the Spanish teacher nerd in me always thinking of authentic resources is... she likes the idea of watching television she understands. ;-)

But I noticed this commercial by Jimmy Dean...

TPRS year 4 - Commercial ("¿Me lo compras?")

Going along with indirect objects, I just loved this commercial that caught me off guard.  Pretty simple language.  Could use it later in the year for Spanish 1 or sometime soon for Spanish 2.  

Could be fun to have kids peruse the COMER website as well (link below).

“Me lo compras”

TPRS year 4 - Commercial ("Leche fresca")

I was thinking I could use this in Spanish 1 or Spanish 2.

Spanish 2 would go nicely with the next unit we are doing where I will need to "cover" indirect object pronouns.  This might even work as a story script if I could isolate some of the structures that we could recycle all year.  Then my students could watch the video and be amazed at their understanding!


While there aren't many indirect objects used in the language in the video, if we had an embedded reading about the video or a similar storyline using, "le pide", "le da" &/or "le dice", we can get further repetitions of them.

“Leche Fresca”

TPRS year 4 - Zapatito blanco, zapatito azul

So I was encouraged by my department to make sure to "cover" the colors and numbers 1-20 before our first common assessment in Spanish 1.  While I could just point to the numbers and colors and make them repeat them over and over, I thought it would be better to drill them (in context) through other sneakier means while communicating in the language.  I have been trying to do this as frequently as possible and as CI friendly as possible.

Last week I read the book Oso Pardo, Oso Pardo, ¿qué ves ahí? (Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?) to them and went slowly and pointed to the animals and described their colors and what noise they make.

Then I asked questions sometimes to check for comprehension.  Most kids did ok on this.  Some kids need to be focused on a little more next time, to ensure better comprehension.

I repeated the book today with much more participation than the first time.  I of course explained that we repeat stuff a lot in Spanish class to make sure each time we understand a little more.

But as I was trying to think about the numbers, I came across this cute little rhyme called: Zapatito Blanco, Zapatito Azul.  (Little white shoe, little blue shoe.)

Basically, as my wife explained to me, in Mexico kids might use it to figure out which kid is going to be it in a hide-or-seek kind of game or something like that.  But I had a different idea.

The lyrics are simple:

zapatito blanco, 
     little white shoe
zapatito azul
     little blue shoe
dime cuántos años tienes tú
     tell me how old you are

We went over the lyrics and I said it a few times so they could hear the rhythm of it.

Basically you go through the lyrics pointing at the different feet of people in the circle.  Then when you get to "tú" at the end, the person has to answer their age in Spanish.  You count out that number and that person is out.  I decided (for more buy in) to give that person a piece of candy: fruity flavored hard lifesaver.  Once someone got candy that really upped the ante and interest.

So then we started on the person to the right and did the rhyme again.  It landed on the person, we counted out their age and gave another kid some candy.  Sometimes I had to shift to a different part in the circle when starting because only the same couple kids were getting a piece of candy (although the kids could have lied about their age).  One kid said he was 20 to try to get the candy back to him but he was one off.  Haha.

Regardless, I think it went well and I think it was a more engaging way to practice numbers in addition to practicing the question, "¿Cuántos años tienes?", which I also have to "cover".

Then afterwards I let the class watch this authentic text:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anHIAjxJKtM

We talked about it in Spanish.

I asked them how old the father was.  Then I asked them what he said near the end: "¿Quién juega?"  A few students actually made it out!  I was so proud.  This worked in perfectly since we have been doing PQA and getting to know them.  Every class has gone over, "____ juega [sport]."

All in all, I thought it went well and I was glad to bring even an authentic resource into class to enhance instruction.

A few videos to hear the rhyme:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE-vs01E8Y4
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbKwJbP-2ww
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMyrbF0K0DI (brothers fighting... more complicated authentic text; multiple possible extensions)

*Revision* My kids figured out if they lied about their age to say the exact number of people in the circle, they get the lifesaver.  

So maybe instead I will have a few numbers in my pockets to act as +/- 0/1/2 and then after they have said how old they are, we'll use that to change the game up a little bit.  This way, they are just saying a number and trying to get them self, but it might change the direction.  Just a thought.  

This activity has been much better for buy-in with counting up to 20 or so and there are more reps and it's more interactive.  I also like the rhyme which includes, colors, diminutive (-ito), clothing (shoe), command (tell me), and the question, "how old are you?"

Día 80 - music as an authentic text

This is in reference to something I started doing this year on Thursdays with a song of the day.  I wrote a post about song day here.

Last week, my students and I were telling a story via TPRS about a rich boy who had 1.5 enormous houses and 20 cars who got excited about seeing a girl with moose antlers.

During the story, the boy had to go to get romance lessons from James Bond and then he came back to the girl much more suave but without any money.  Somehow it clicked that he should tell the girl: "No tengo dinero ni nada que dar, lo único que tengo es amor para amar.  Si así tú me quieres, te puedo querer, pero si no me quieres, ni modo que hacer"  (I don't have any money or anything to give.  All I have is love to love you with.  If you can love me as I am, I can love you.  If you can't, no big deal.)

The neat thing is that was a chorus from a song we had done in class and we were able to simply incorporate it one day and the students could follow it and it helped establish another connection with the song.

Music has become such an amazing authentic text for my students.  We have started learning high frequency words such as love, heart, soul, etc just through going over songs.  It's great for certain vocabulary.  Not to mention it helps kids relate to class (as well as the language).

With the aforementioned post in mind, I actually had a student walk in just a second ago.  She told me that she has fallen in love with Spanish music.  Another student had some music playing in Spanish and had her listen to it and she asked what it was.  He told her they had listened to it in Spanish class and then he went on to let her listen to other songs by the same artist.  These other songs we haven't listened to in class but he's found a love for a band through the one song we listened to in class.

Do you see what is going on?  I'm not even exposing them as much anymore.  Now they've learned about a few bands in Spanish and they are exploring them on their own!  This astounds me.  I just started doing it as a warm-up and it became a half class period or more when we do it.  Some of the kids who usually are disengaged in TPRS (which is hard.., because TPRS is incredibly interesting), are all over the song on song day.  They memorize them and request we listen to the songs again days where we have extra time.  It's great.

I'm so glad I've stumbled upon this.

What's neat is in college we learned about providing authentic texts to the students.  I was never quite sure how to do that.  Sometimes it's hard to adapt an authentic text to a class' needs.  The teacher made sure to remind us not to change the text, but rather to change the task associated with the text.

So the task is to fill in some words (with a word bank) for listening comprehension.  Then after they listen a few times and watch the video we go over the blanks as well as the meaning.  Some students write down the whole translation, others probably throw their music sheets away.

But many of them have been telling me that they've been listening to music outside of class and it's such a neat connection to have with them. We are able to talk about certain cultural themes as well since the songs are poetry.