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You know the saying, you make plans and God (or the higher power you believe in) laughs. I planned to start using my digital readers right away with my students but as it turned out, I needed to ease in with my 8th graders. My 7th graders are novice-low because they have not had normal world language instruction in forever it seems. I think this image posted by We are Teachers on Instagram was such a wake-up call.
My 8th graders had me last year and for 8 months had 30 minutes of class with a hybrid model and a school day that ended at 1:20 pm. My 7th graders had not had any Spanish since the fifth grade and most of it was online. I quickly realized that I had to rethink how I wanted to approach my students. My priority was to establish connections and relationships so that they would lower their affective filter and in turn encourage them to take risks and want to use the language in class.
Here's what I decided to do:
7th Grade
I wanted to start with Las Aventuras de Miguelito but they were just not ready.thought For the past six weeks, we have been using the language to greet each other formally and informally, we've greeted each other at different times of the day (Saludos y DespedidasClick here to see this resource I used. the visuals helped my students), had fun with the Spanish Alphabet by having Spelling Bees (they ask to do this every day) talked about the day, the date, and the weather. Now that they have been exposed to all this, they are ready to get started with the digital readers which now contain vocabulary they will recognize and give them the new vocabulary we will be working with which is the School Unit. I now am also ready to post about each chapter and what we will be doing on my Flangoo Digital Reader Users page. Hope to see you there!
8th Grade
I thought I would start my 8th graders talking about their families and reading Apestoso which I found fits very nicely with the family vocabulary associated with our unit, but I forgot that we did not get past the Food Unit last year, more specifically talking about healthy eating and exercising. This is part of my curriculum and they will see this topic come up at the high school so I decided that would be our starting point and I would skip starting a digital reader for the time being. So far they have been enjoying the unit because they were already familiar with some of the vocabulary and eager to add some more to their conversations. I made a digital mystery picture (they love them!) to review vocabulary and answer personalized questions about the picture revealed. We are talking about their food preferences and choices and we used this Jamboard Activity to view each other's preferences, healthy food and exercise choices with a "this or that" activity (¿Eso o esto?) I then used a story I created to review adjective agreement, the verb ser and the vocabulary (Roberto No Come Saludable will be available in my TPT Store soon). They love reading about Roberto. He is a character I use starting in 7th grade. It makes what they are learning relevant to them and they thoroughly enjoy his "misadventures".
This is where my students are six weeks into the school year. It certainly has been a challenge to navigate through everything, but we are learning and having fun and most importantly using the target language. I hope these ideas and resources are helpful to you. I hope that I have been able to and can continue to contribute and help in any way I can. We are all in this together. Let us support each other! I'm excited to start the school year and grow in my journey with CI.
If you need objective slides, I love creating them! Check out my Day of the Dead Objective Slides on my Freebies page!
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If you are interested in any of my other resources you can find them in my TpT Store.
Hasta la próxima!
Find all my links here: https://linktr.ee/middleschoolsenora
*****DISCLAIMER***** If necessary, I have attempted to give credit where credit is due, if I have inadvertently not done so, please don't hate, communicate and I will lovingly make a correction to give credit to a fellow educator with the utmost of respect. Thank you! I am only human and I always come from a place of kindness.