Quinceañeras, un fin de semana fantástico y verbos -ar

I am wrapping up the La Familia unit with my 8th graders this week. We have had such a great time talking about our families! We talked about family relationships, practiced the grammar structures of tener and adjetivos posesivos, we all talked about how our pets are part of our family too with the mini unit on Mascotas son Familia También and read Marcos y su Mascota a digital reader available on Flangoo about a boy making the big decision of what pet is best suited for him and his family.

If you use Realidades, you know that this topic relates to Capitulo 5A Fiesta en la Familia, but I have always felt it important to separate the theme of family from the “fiesta” until the end. As we wrapped up, I asked students “¿Como celebras ocasiones en tu familia?” with a couple of more follow up questions leading up to parties. Once establishing how, when, where we celebrate parties with our families, I introduced the topic of La Quinceañera. Most, if not all, of my students know what a Quinceañera is, but many don’t know the traditions involved with this very important cultural rite of passage. Realidades 1 has a reading in their Adelante section all about Quinceañeras. I assigned this reading and they completed comprehension questions which lead to more discussions about the Quinceañera invitations along with the cultural use of paternal and maternal surnames. I even showed them my Quinceañera picture!

This week, I will introduce the vocabulary for Chapter 1 of La Quinceañera de Nayeli by Denise Hatcher, a Flangoo digital reader, and work with them to establish meaning. I will then read aloud while they do choral translations as I check for understanding. Once we have completed the chapter, I will then hand out the comprehension questions provided at the end of the Chapter to verify understanding. We will be going a bit slower with this reader as it is a bit harder than what they previously read. Additionally I will be introducing Capítulo 5B to work on in parallel.If you are interested in seeing my resources for this digital readers, you can access them on the Facebook Group I created for users or teachers who are interested in using Flangoo Digital Readers.

As mentioned in my previous post, my 7th graders are working on the school unit with correlates to Capitulo 2A. Students are using vocabulary to talk about their school day, their class periods, subjects, teachers, etc. I introduced them to Roberto and they had to figure out his schedule by reading clues and filling out his schedule grid. Once they had filled out his schedule, I assigned a comprehension-based story with Roberto as the main character where they needed to use the schedule they had previous filled out and vocabulary to fill in parts of the story. They really enjoyed talking about his day because things didn’t really go well and it lends itself to talking about how to be better organized for the school day. Subject pronouns were introduced in context while using this story.

This week we are starting to use regular -ar verbs. I am planning to introduce the different verb conjugations with another comprehension based story I wrote that includes previously learned vocabulary and current vocabulary we are using. Roberto is at it again with Un fin de semana fantástico para Roberto. It’s the weekend and Roberto is out of school doing many activities before he has to get back to school on Monday, it includes his friend Pepe from the first story and introduced new characters as well. I have found that my students love having a character that they can talk about all year with the different topics that we talk about in class. It makes it very relatable and fun. Once we have finished the story, I used this game to practice the -ar conjugations. It is tried and true and updated for use with Chromebooks, remote and hybrid learning and of course, once we can share pencils and paper, for partner work. I don’t know about you, but I used to use real dice instead of virtual ones, and guess what used to happen? You guessed it, the dice would be flying everywhere! On the computer – no flying dice!

This is where my 7th and 8th graders are right now. I will be sharing what I will be doing with the readers as I go along. Follow my Facebook page for updates on what I’m doing in class. I have also started a Facebook Group for Flangoo Digital Reader Users where I will post what I’m doing with the readers I am using, please join me!

If you are interested in any of the above resources you can find them in my TpT Store.

I hope these ideas and resources are helpful to you. I hope that I can contribute and help in any way I can. We are all in this together. Let us support each other!

Hasta la próxima!

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