Story + Movietalk + Song - "Soy yo" by Bomba Estéreo (Spanish 1)

Still from "Soy yo" (Bomba Estéreo)

After the fun with the previous mini-unit on el chico del apartamento 512, I thought this would be a logical progression and I've wanted to use this song all year ever since seeing that Kara Jacobs did something with it.

So Bomba Estéreo came out with this great song called "Soy yo" (I am me) that is a really positive song about just being yourself. While Kara used it in the beginning of the year for repetitions of "SOY", I preferred to use it later on when my kids would have more language and I could relate it to deeper discussion in class about being who you are.  I know my stuff doesn't hold a candle to hers, but I think my students enjoyed it for the most part, which was nice since it's the end of the year.

Still from "Soy yo" (Bomba Estéreo)

Before showing them the reading, I brought up the first one of the year and told them we could warm up real quick. They read it without any problems. One student said in English, "Wait, that was so easy!" And I responded to him, "It is now. But when we first went over it, it was a little bit hard for you!" I wanted them to realize HOW much they have been exposed to this year in the Target Language and how far they have come in one year.

I really wanted to review some of the physical descriptions vocab, family vocab, places vocab, activities vocab, etc. The thing I love about storytelling (TPRS) is that you can really revisit things all the time because they can come up naturally in stories unlike with a textbook.


My structures were:

• viaja a - s/he travels to  (NEW)
• se ríen de - they laugh at / make fun of (NEW)
• sigue viajando - s/he keeps traveling (revisited)
• se va - s/he leaves (revisited)
• llegan a - they arrive at (revisited)

You might notice how I was reusing some phrases. But I made sure to use a different form of them in this story or added a different "ing" because just going over something once is NEVER enough for acquisition in my experience for lower levels. They need to constantly be exposed and re-exposed to vocabulary/structures throughout the year for long term retention.  The stuff they only hear once (for most kids) will most likely be forgotten to make space for more frequently used language.

Anyways,  here's the rough plan I used with links to the activities mentioned. It's bare bones, but hopefully it will inspire you!

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 - Movietalk/Song - Celos

There is a song I discovered years ago and always found a way to tie it into storytelling because of the themes in it of romance and betrayal.  It also has a lot of good solid TPR words like body parts and concrete actions (kiss, look, walk, dance).  It is seriously the best song.

I just found out it's a remake, but either way, it's the only version I ever knew and it's called Celos.  Fanny Lu (Colombian singer) sings the remake and the video is even fun.

In previous years we did a cloze activity and watched the video.  This year, I have some targets I want to hit on structures (busca, encuentra, quiere hablar con, se cae, camina, sobre/hacia) and thought this would be the perfect way to introduce those before we read Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso.

So here's the activity I came up with.  Let me know what you think!

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 - song - El Pollo

Many years ago, I learned this song from an Argentinian gentleman in Guadalajara, Mexico on a missions trip.  He was in charge of the activities of this sports camp at a park.

One of the favorite things of everyone was this song where he said the following:

El pollo   (Hold hand up on eeeeeeeeeeel  and stomp when you say pollo)
El pollo con una pata. (step with one foot)
El pollo con otra pata.  (step with both feet)
El pollo con una alita. (step with both feet and move an arm like a wing)
El pollo con otra alita. (step with both feet and move both arms like wings)
El pollo con la cabeza. (step with both feet, move both arms, and move head)
El pollo con la colita. (turn around and shake your caboose)

Even with high school students, this is one that was a crowd favorite at my first school.  I kind of forgot about it at my previous school.  But some of my students asked about a poster I made of it that was hanging up and so we went over it and they seemed to enjoy the simplicity and silliness of it.

So If you would like to try it out in your class, I'll upload an audio file later of me saying it or maybe even a short video clip of me doing it.

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?"

TPRS Year 3 - Story/Song combo - Me cortaron mal el pelo

So many moons ago I stumbled across a song that was really catchy to me in a silly way.  It's from this show 31 minutos in Chile, which is kind of like a Sesame Street type show, although I'm not as sure about the educational value of it.  After reading up on it, it seems more like some of the cartoons, like Pinky and the Brain, that were as popular with adults as they were with children.

But I digress.  So I found this song called, Me cortaron mal el pelo (they cut my hair poorly).  I wasn't ever really sure what to do with  the song until recently.

You see I've been storytelling the past few years, and it has occurred to me that ANYTHING can help us come up with our structures for storytelling in class.  I needed to talk about some of the things so my students could better understand the Piratas del Caribe y el mapa secreto (Pirates of the Caribbean and the secret map) novel we started.

And the song is fairly simple and lends itself wonderfully to creating a story with some structures I needed to get some more reps of anyways.  Feel free to adapt it as needed for your classrooms and let me know if you come up with other ideas for it or if you end up using it.

Here were my structures (since I used the phone story last week and they went well together):

• ya no podía ir a la escuela
       s/he couldn't go to school any longer
• "Puedo cortar tu pelo"
      "I can cut your hair"
• le cortó mal el pelo
    s/he cut his/her hair poorly

TPRS Year 3 - Song - Las cosas pequeñas

I wanted to share something I did in my classes yesterday.

Usually on Thursdays, we listen to a song in Spanish.  They can be a kids' song, a pop song, a traditional song, an old song, etc.  Sometimes they'll have gestures that we can teach with certain lines.  But once in awhile, the song is a song that I want the kids to hear.

With my Spanish 2 kids, I found a song called Las cosas pequeñas by Prince Royce.

We hadn't really done much with the word cosas (things) in Spanish 1 or in the Spanish 2 class up to this point.  This is quite crazy since that is an incredibly high frequency and important word.

But I wanted my kids to follow the song a little better and have a good conversation with them.  So I tested the waters by starting class after the warm up by writing on the board:

¿Cuáles son las cosas más importantes?  (Which are the most important things?)

Then we proceed to talk about the most important things in their lives.  Some kids already got the cue and started mentioning things like "familia" (family).  Others joked around and I noticed that

I proceeded to ask them, "¿Las puedes comprar? (Can you buy them?)

The idea was to talk for about 20 minutes and then to listen to the song a few times with a cloze activity.

In one class I could tell that the students got very serious after a few minutes of my talking to them and explaining things that might be important.  We came to the conclusion that things like my saying "hello" to them every day at my door were very important and yet small.  I explained to them as well that every day I go home and I open the door, I see my one-year-old daughter smile and dance around because she's happy to see me.

In that class we actually talked the rest of that class about this topic of "small things."  The neatest part was that so often in class we are silly and talk about random things in Spanish.  During this activity, my students actually paid attention because I was being real with them and telling them about something that we don't normally talk about in class.

Note to self, talk about serious issues more often in class throughout the year.

TPRS year 3 - Agentes Secretos (teaching book)

So before Christmas, another Spanish teacher (at another small school) and I had planned out a unit of sorts for the first semester.  The goal was to teach the kids enough of the structures in the novel Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso.

The following is a reflection of the reading of the actual book as well as other activities that we did during the unit...

Went well:

• many students enjoyed reading a book and commented on that in their reflections on the unit
• students did well (minus a few outliers) on the test that was IN Spanish about the book and things that happened
• utilized different learning styles to help the kids understand the novel
• powerpoints with animations of characters 
• actors
• drawing
• reviewing
• the Native / Heritage speakers read the chapters for us as narrators

Improve on:

• doing more activities to vary review of chapters
• it seemed like we were rushing through the book near the end which made some kids uncomfortable
• start doing book a little earlier
• realize that not everyone likes reading
• talking about the students and linking language to them and their lives
• having students guess details in story...
• teaching the novel using reading strategies 

TPRS year 3 - Agentes Secretos - week 1

So this week we finally started reading Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso by Mira Canion in my Spanish 1 and Spanish 2 classes.  I thought it would be great for both levels and we could just do more in Spanish 2 with culture and embedded readings about history and culture to enhance the story.

This week for our TPRS structures and embedded reading, Josef Sallen (the teacher I'm planning this year with) had a great idea.  He decided to write an embedded reading about Francisco Franco (a dictator from Spain's history that also is mentioned in Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso).  It talked about how Francisco Franco is a boy and his dad is a soldier and Francisco later wants to be a soldier.  Then it gives some background about the Spanish Civil War and the two opposing sides in the war.

So it occurred to me that since we're going to be reading the novel and Joe had written the embedded reading about Franco, maybe we could find some other things from the era to help us go back in time and to understand the perspectives (that's national standards talk!).  So I found some propaganda posters that I showed for warm ups and had the students figure out which side they probably went with (the day after the embedded reading).  And on Thursday (on song day), we listened to Ay Carmela.  I saved a lesson plan about it.  It's a hymn for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War.  It talks about the Battle of the Ebro (arguably a somewhat important battle in the Spanish Civil War).

I did a history lesson about parts of the Spanish Civil War with a PowerPoint in Spanish halfway through class.  My kids actually seemed to enjoy it!  Who knew that they could enjoy history in Spanish class.  The best part is that it only helps us to further understand the backdrop for the novel Agentes Secretos y el mural de Picasso.

Then today (Friday) we read the first chapter of the novel.  I haven't done a novel reading before.  I asked my kids to be patient with me since I was trying something new this year in teaching them.  Then we read.  One of the neat things was we have many Spanish speakers in class and I asked if they wouldn't mind helping me read the Spanish since they're so much better at the language than me!  It went over wonderfully. The kids were able to follow along and read while someone spoke in Spanish with a native accent.

Some problems of course did occur:

1. some students no matter how easy you might try to make it just don't like reading
2. the readings are way too easy for Native / Heritage speakers
3. only a few kids really bought into helping translate the novel as we went through
• I would really love for all the students to get excited about understanding and helping out
• How can I create a classroom atmosphere that will be more comfortable for all students?

Some things that went well:

1. For most students, the structures in the book were way easy to translate and it helped with confidence (still confusion between quiere and tiene among some Spanish 1 students)
2. Native / Heritage speakers read out loud as we followed.  I asked them if they wouldn't mind helping me read since they spoke Spanish way better than me while we followed.  Most jumped to the task since I asked them to hold back on helping us translate today. 

Ideas for future:

A teacher had an idea to get my kids to participate more when reading, I could have assign the students into groups with a color or animal and then periodically only allow that group to answer the questions.  This could be a much better idea for those big classes where some kids monopolize the answering.

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.

Día 15 - Song!

So I found this incredible amount of children's songs in Spanish with animation.  They're not those cheesy songs that no one has heard of that were specifically created for Spanish classes.  They are cheesy on their own and people that I know actually heard them when they were children!

The songs can be found on youtube.

I decided that I want to start off class a little different each day.  So far I have figured out that I want to incorporate jokes and songs throughout the week.  Some other ideas of things to incorporate are riddles, news articles, commercials and Chuck Norris Facts in Spanish.  I want to do a different gimmick each day of the week so that it stays interesting and each day one might student have something to look forward to.

The idea is to give the kids something at the beginning (or end) of class to bring them into class.  It's kind of like a warm up and it's also a chance to expose them a little more to the culture.  If we tell stories for longer because of this, that's ok.  We're still learning Spanish and I am working on making the input more comprehensible.

Today, we sang: Cucú Cucú.  It's a catchy little song about a frog and different people.  I had my students fill in some blanks of familiar words and we sang it.  Even if they didn't want to sing, I asked that they at least sang/spoke 'Cucú Cucú'.  For the most part they all did.  It made class a little goofier to start out with and I found that the participation was even better today than yesterday for some of my shyer classes.

I also read them a quote from Blaine Ray that I got from Ben Slavic's book TPRS in a Year!.  Blaine Ray says:

"I believe people who are the most effective at TPRS don't tell stories.  They ask questions, pauses, and listen for cute answers from the students."

I read this to my students to remind them that I am only in class to help them with the Spanish part of the story and to help a story flow along a path.  I provide the skeleton of the story with a basic outline and it's their job to fill in the fleshy parts.

It seemed like they responded well to my reminding them that the class was about them and their ideas.  I hope tomorrow can go as well!  Maybe I should post the quote somewhere in my room to remind myself that the stories are not about my ideas, but rather about theirs.