Appetizers: "Fotolabras"

I keep working on appetizers as it seems to be a great way of engaging my students at the beginning of the class. 

This time, I come with a combination of some simple ideas, visuals and connections to learn words. Visuals are most of the time the best shortcut when it comes to something we can zip in an image and connections are a very good way of helping our students to make associations and acquire words easier in the long term. Connections are usually based on antonyms, synonyms, cognates, etc. but if you find more, do not hesitate to put them into practice, your students will thank this practice.

Human beings are curious by nature

Aristotle

Lunaprofe 9/25/2018  No comment

Appetizers: Sudoku de verbos

Revisiting the idea of Appetizers, quick, interesting activities to start off your class, this week we are looking at incorporating this traditional Japanese game. The adaptation is simple, switching numbers for verb conjugations.

If you want to know my students experience. Just by asking around I thought that some of them love this and others hate it. Hence, so far I was not clear on whether this activity is one of the best to start classes with or not, but just exposing students to it and paying attention to their feedback is enough to get to know if it is going to be productive with that class or not. Remember that flexibility is important as well as listening to your students to build up a positive and productive class environment.
Please, let me hear how does it go in your class ;)

Then, I thought I would just pass a google form to collect some feedback and the results surprised me, 83,3% enjoyed practicing and it turns out it's their favorite activity to start the class

Creativity is putting your imagination to work,

and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.

Ken Robinson

Lunaprofe 2/26/2018  1 comment

Appetizers: Criptogramas

This activity is to be used as a class starter (appetizer) to turn on your class attention in a dynamic way that will help your students to switch from other subject to Spanish and will help them focus on the language. 

Why cryptograms?

In order to solve a cryptogram our students have to confront a process of rewriting a word searching for meaning and at the same time they have to find and check a global significance for the phrase, sentence or complete message. 

Through this process students use a previous representation of the word that they will use as a guide to order the letters. Just the correct order of the different letters will result in a comprehensible final message.

By doing this our students are working out many different interesting skills (not just for language). If you want to know more, read the justification in the presentation.

If you want to reach somewhere new

you have to take a different direction

Lunaprofe 2/12/2018  2 comments

Bellwork

Bellwork is just an activity that students complete as they walk into the class before the bell rings for the lesson. 

That's the definition, but we don't need to be that strict when doing bellwork in our classes. Actually, there are activities in this bellwork presentation that will last 10 minutes, that will have a different impact in your instruction time depending on how long your classes are or any other factors. 

Anyways, the idea behind our bellwork activities is that our students are engaged as soon as they walked into your classroom and (hopefully;) focused on the subject. 

Different light: use these activities as an exit ticket from your class, or as flexible homework, or as enrichment, sub-plans, or ... 

It is impossible for a man to learn

what he thinks he already knows

Epictetus

Lunaprofe 1/15/2018  7 comments