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!

Responses to Comment - Complexity #2

I already posted a response to a question earlier here about complexity.

But in light of a conversation I have had with a few students I think this illustrates my point in questioning our understanding of complexity by traditional terms.

Example 1:
In my Spanish 1 classes, as recommended by Blaine Ray in his Look I can Talk books, we can teach the kids past and present in Spanish 1.  The more we expose them to both, the less they will rely on just the present tense.  So that's what I do. I tell oral stories in the past tense and do readings/movietalks/etc in the present tense.  When we talk about their lives, we might switch between tenses and I'll occasionally do a pop-up point about "Why did I say: querías (you wanted) instead of quieres (you want)?"