Verb Visuals: Transformer Verbs

The preterit tense has always been tough for my students with its many rules and changes.  I explain them, we practice, but we still struggle.  With our midterm next week, I have begun the review with my Spanish II students.  Since today was also a late arrival day due to nasty winter roads, I only had twenty minutes with each class.  Instead of writing out sentences or conjugating random verbs, I decided to review the irregular stem verbs by discussing the set and creating a visual with the hope that the different approach would help the information stick a little better.

Earlier in the year when I first taught these verbs to my Spanish II students, I taught them in four categories or as I referred to them "families."  In our notes each family had its own house (really, I drew houses in the notes and that's where students wrote the information).  The families were named after the common letter that appeared in all the new stems after they were transformed as part of their preterit conjugation: U, V, I, and J.

Today we rewrote the infinitives in each family to make the letter.  For example, saber formed one side of the U, poder the other side, and then poner curved to close the bottom.  Then we wrote the new stems next to each letter.  We used a different color for each family.  At the end students used their normal pens or pencils to write down the unique endings for these four groups of verbs.

Then I named an infinitive and a subject and all the class had to think for a few seconds before I pulled a namestick and that student answered.  We all repeated before I gave the next question.

We ran out of time here but if it had been a regular period, I probably would have sent the students on-line then to do some more individualized practice.

 I advise practicing creating these visuals on your own first.  It did take me a few tries to get more comfortable with writing them and then I could give advice to the kids on how to be more successful with their letters (we still ran out of room with the larger J family...)