We are less than a week away from March Music Madness 2024. Plenty of time to get in on what will sure to be the highlight of the year for your students. We recently sat down with Claudio Elliot on her podcast Growing with Proficiency to discuss the Music Tournament. One of the key talking points is how we can use music as a way to discuss in the target language, without having to study the lyrics.
Next week I’ll be using the Spanish Lottery video of Justino with materials from the Comprehensible Classroom. In order to preview the story I used a Mad Libs activity, generated by ChatGPT which I fined-tuned. Students worked with a partner: they first wrote the words on a list. Then they asked their partner for their words to fill in the text. They then read the completed text to their partner.
Our March Music Madness is just under a month away and we’ve got some surprises in store. The first is the unveiling of our Teacher Bracket Prediction Challenge. Teachers can fill out a google form with their picks to try and end up with a “perfect bracket”. The teacher(s) with the most points will be winning some high-desired prizes.
If you are reading a novel in your Spanish class, we’ve got a new activity that you may want to try. My 8th grade class is currently reading “La Lucha” by Melisa Lopez. After reading chapter 6, I had students take out a piece of paper and go back through the chapter and come up with a list of 20 words they felt were most representative or most important to the events of the chapter. It had to be individual words or small phrases of 1-3 words, words that shouldn’t be separated.
As teachers look ahead for resources to request for the next school year, we are sharing a curated list of Subscriptions services or websites for World Language teachers. The list ranges from curricular resources that are targeted for language acquisition and development in reading, listening, and even some speaking, as well as gaming sites or lesson planning sites using AI.
With a toddler and newborn, I haven’t posted as much as I would like the past year. But if there’s one thing that gets me foregoing sleep so I can work on creating… it’s the annual March Music Madness. We are happy to announce that our playlist has been shared and we are gearing up for our 12th bracket tournament.
After different variations over the years, [FVR (Free Voluntary Reading], Lectura Libre, SSR (Silent Spanish Reading) among others] I’ve again renamed our reading time in class to ISR: Independent Spanish Reading.
