February Spanish Club

We looked at the mola designs from a native people group in Panama.  I found this site to be a nice intro to the topic: http://hoodmuseum.dartmouth.edu/docs/0109teachclassactmolas.pdf

I then collected some more pictures of molas and put them in a powerpoint so the students could see some more examples of the molas.

Finally the students got to pick out a mola design that I had printed and color it in.  Some students chose to post theirs in the room and I will have one of my classes vote on which one they like the most next week.

This was not our most exciting meeting but it was a different piece of culture than we will get to in the classroom.

Una Visita al Museo de Arte

I teach art vocabulary to Spanish II students.  Honestly, there is a lot more I could do with this unit and I am working on adding in more culture.  However, one of the days that we work with these vocabulary words is a day that I am proud of: the art museum visit.

I bring in little objects that I have picked up in my travels/received as gifts and place them around the room so they can double as sculptures for the day.  I tape mini-prints of works by Picasso and Dalí around the room along with transparencies of other paintings (the only time I use transparencies the whole year since I no longer have an overhead projector).  I dig out a larger, rolled up poster of Acapulco and stick it to my bulletin board to pretend that it is a mural.  Voila!  I have transformed my room into an art museum for a day.

a sculpture (from Colombia)

I created a sign with a name for our museum for the first time this year: El Museo de Arte del Rey Felipe VI.  I liked naming the museum but want a better sign for next year; I might even put it on the door to the room instead of just the whiteboard in front.  Also for next year I want to give students entrance tickets the day before.  For homework they will be expected to write a sentence that uses art vocabulary on the back and then must hand the ticket to me to enter the room.

This year I put on my docent voice to explain the assignment and made sure to remind them that flash photography was not permitted.  (Apparently I did a really good impersonation since one boy told me I might have missed my true career calling.)  Each student was advised to pick up a museum guide which was really a list of their vocabulary since carrying computers around to reference their notes would have become awkward.

At this point the students moved around the classroom/museum at their own pace to look at the artwork and respond.  For each piece they had to write three sentences: what type of art they saw (painting, portrait, sculpture, etc), a description (it was traditional for example), and their reaction (I liked it/loved it, etc).  I definitely want to work on having a greater variety of artwork next year although I think everyone knew the word for painting by the end of the period!  (It doesn't help that this year I left my personal collection at home--just too tired with musical rehearsals I guess!)

Students get a small classwork grade for the assignment.  I look for adjective agreement, spelling, and overall sentence structure but I don't take off a lot of points for mistakes especially if they are repeated.  I also look for variety in adjectives used.  I do have a minimum number of artworks that I expect students to have seen but since I let them work at their own pace, this number is not really high and I don't tell them what it is.  I would rather have students reflecting on the artwork and writing well than rushing to hit a magic number.

Celebrating Success

Another bulletin board.  This one is honoring not just students who earned A's in the second quarter but showed significant improvement from the first quarter.

Object Pronouns

My students love hate/fear object pronouns.  I have tried teaching them according to grammar rules and the idea of asking a set of questions (what is the action of the sentence?  what is receiving the action?  what or who is receiving something).  I have taught what object pronouns are in English even spending a whole day reviewing the concept alone with no Spanish involved.  Nothing works.

This year to review with Spanish III I took a different approach.  I still don't know if it is better but for one day at least the students were more confident in what they were doing (unfortunately today's activity seemed to put us back at square one but I have to start somewhere!).

Instead of going through any rules, I just dove in with a question: ¿Me comprarás la pizza?  Students used their individual whiteboards to write me a complete sentence answer in Spanish.  We did several questions like this and even had them create one of their own using their own vocabulary.  Then after we had practiced with "me" and "te," we expanded to include "nos" and "les."  Eventually we even got to "le."

Each time I was asking a question and they were responding, another area that we struggle in.  What was also different this time around was that we started with indirect objects first.  I have always begun with direct objects in previous years.

We took some simple notes the next day, not even writing anything done this first day of practice.  We just worked with the concept without any official rules.

The jury is still out on this twist in my approach but at the very least I don't think we're any farther behind.  (Plus I think today's problems had as much to do with some incorrect answers in the key for their activity as anything else--double check everything!)  I am debating on using this approach in Spanish II to see if it would work with students who do not have any prior Spanish knowledge of the concept.  What do you think?

Happy Friday!