Chicano Park

Chicano Park - Día de los Muertos, 2014 (My first visit to the park.)

Earlier this month I had the chance to go with the 6th graders to Chicano Park here in San Diego. The field trip was part of a really cool cross-curricular Social Justice project that they were doing in their other classes. Next year I want to integrate a lot more connections in my Spanish class, but I was really excited to go along this year, and I want this to be an ongoing part of my Spanish curriculum.

Back in Detroit, I collaborated with the art programs at both schools I worked at, to take field trips to the Detroit Institute of Art, especially to see Diego Rivera's mural. It's an amazing mural with significant ties to local history and culture, and I was sad to leave it behind when I moved to California.

Since I moved to San Diego in August, I've been looking for local opportunities. Chicano Park has an amazing history and is the perfect place for students to learn about art, the local Spanish-speaking community, our identity as a border town, alternative histories, and an inspiring example of grassroots movement and personal activism that they are studying through their Social Justice project.

We got a great tour by members of the park's steering committee. My group was led by Victor Ochoa, one of the muralists. I learned as much as the kids did!

Before going on the field trip, I made this scavenger hunt for the kids. They looked for the phrases around the park and matched them to the murals they were included on, and then later in Spanish class we translated them and connected each phrase to the history we had learned about. (The file includes an answer key. I made it using images from this documentation project, but I already know I'll be updating it with more images and phrases later on.)

As a follow-up project, students are researching and presenting information about people from the Spanish-speaking world. This includes famous Hispanic figures, some relatives and family members, and people they learned about during the field trip. I used one of the murals from Chicano Park as a starting point for this project, and created a Thinglink for students to explore the people and symbols pictured.



This year, the field trip, subsequent project, and curricular connections were all somewhat hasty, in the midst of end-of-the-year chaos and the general upheaval of establishing and refining a new program at a new school. I have high hopes for next year, however, and am excited to do more.

The Chicano Park Steering Committee was so helpful in coordinating and leading our tours. They have a website at www.chicano-park.com.

For local educators - if you have led field trips to Chicano Park or would like to in the future, I would love to hear more about what you have done, share resources, and collaborate!

Chicano Park - Día de los Muertos, 2014

Movimiento Naranja - Movimiento Ciudadano

I haven't posted much here recently. I've been busy with some exciting things (working to expand the Spanish program at our school, lots of cross-curricular planning for next year, and some end-of-the-year projects with the middle school students.)

Every year at the end of the year, I find myself trying to do things that are too complex and too long for the inevitable chaos of end-of-the-year schedules, where student and teachers alike are affected by state testing, field trips, camps, absences, and (in my case recently!) immune systems that are succumbing to end-of-the-semester stress. I'm excited about some of the projects my middle school students are doing - but a little hesitant to share before I see how they turn out.

However, I want to use this blog to reflect on what I'm doing, and to share what is working - so I'm attempting to do that, even in these last crazy weeks of the school year! Here's something that may be useful to you as the school year winds down.

Here's a song that I heard on the radio* a few weeks ago. It was so catchy that I immediately looked it up. As it turns out, it is a promotional music video for a Mexican political party.

As a disclaimer: I am not promoting this political party or any of their campaigns. But I am congratulating them on writing a simple, catchy song with a feel-good music video that includes lots of beautiful images of Mexico. There are quite a few familiar shots for my students and I - the border fence, and scenes from our neighboring city across the border, Tijuana.

I've used this for some grammar practice in middle school, and played it for my younger students to wrap up our Mexico-focused lessons about Cinco de Mayo. (It's a good "get the classroom cleaned up" song, too.)

Thanks to the folks in the Spanish Teacher Share group on Edmodo for helping me find and correct the lyrics! Here they are, with several different activities I did with my students:

• Cognates: Matching translations (to lines with lots of cognates)
• Grammar/Conjugation: Ser, Estar, and Tener conjugations
• Advanced: What does this song tell us about the party's political platform? (Led to some interesting discussion of political propaganda in middle school.)

If you find any errors in the lyrics, let me know!  Also, I haven't been able to find the name of the artist who wrote the song - do you know?

*Side note: Since moving to San Diego, I've discovered a new hobby: Listening to Mexican political ads awkwardly translated into English, on the English stations broadcast from Tijuana.

Culture in 3 Acts: Semana Santa

I started rethinking some of my cultural lessons after a colleague presented about Three Act Mathematical Stories. After getting back from break I applied the concept to a cultural lesson about Semana Santa.

My main goal was to create a very student-driven exploration of culture. The ACTFL standards ask students to explore the connections between products, practices, and perspectives of the target culture, but it's often up to the teacher to select which products, practices, and perspectives to focus on. With a large range of options, how do we choose which are most relevant and important to share with our students? One option is to let students direct the focus of those explorations. Here's how that worked out in my classes this week.

Here's a copy of the guided notes I used with my class during this assignment.

Games for review and practice: Two great resources

This coming week my middle school students will be taking some quizzes - a vocabulary quiz on verbs for interests and pastimes for 6th grade, and a ser vs. estar quiz for 7th and 8th grade. Both quizzes will be taken and graded online (thanks to Google Forms and Flubaroo) but in class we have also been using some fun digital tools for review and practice!

At the beginning of the school year, I focused a lot on individual learning styles and ways to practice that work for each individual. More recently, our focus has been on group work. Our school's virtue of the month for March is Cooperation, and this is a good time to find ways to learn together, with lots of group explorations and assignments. Our review for upcoming vocabulary and grammar quizzes has also been in groups, using two review games:

Activity: ZAP


How I used it: 
I put students in groups and gave each group two whiteboards. I asked the class a review question (normally the translation of a vocabulary word or a sentence.) The first group that had the answer up (and correct!) got to choose a number from the Zap board - and scores were changed accordingly!

Will probably work well for:

• Spur-of-the-moment practice - all you need is the online template, and whiteboards. 
• Groups with good teamwork and generally good behavior, and who love a competition! 
• Student-chosen groups, since the end scores are less a result of correct answers and more a result of blind luck (based on the numbers chosen!)

Will probably not work well for: 

• Any classes that are already loud and chaotic, since this can get pretty crazy - especially with the random swapping of scores!

Tips for success:

1. To make sure everyone gets a chance to participate, require that students rotate the board among their group members - or require that all team members have a board and all have the correct answer!
2. Require students to request numbers in the target language.
3. If groups are too chaotic, play with individual students, each with their whiteboard, and randomly select a student each round to give their answer. (Choose from a jar of sticks, etc.)

 

Activity: Flippity.net Quiz Show

How I used it: 
I used Flippity's amazing template to created leveled questions related to what we were studying - Verbos y Opiniones and Ser vs. Estar. It is time consuming to come up with 30 separate items, but once you type the questions and answers into the online template, it automatically creates a Jeopardy-style quiz show. You click on the numbers to pick questions in each category and difficulty level, and click buttons to choose teams that answered correctly or incorrectly - the site keeps track of scores automatically. (You can add or delete teams, edit team names, and adjust scores as needed - for example, I give bonus points for the first teams ready to play, and take off points for things like off-task behavior or misuse of supplies.)

Will probably work well for:

• Mixed level groups: I made sure to distribute my native speakers evenly throughout my teams.
• Carefully leveled items: I put items using new vocabulary (or that included written accents and other common mistakes even for my native speakers) in the 500 spaces.
• Test preparation: You can even try out some new test items.

Will probably not work well for: 

• Spur-of-the-moment practice, since you need to create the questions.
• Student-chosen groups, if you have a wide variety of language levels in one class.

Tips for success:

1.  Make sure every member of the team writes down the answer correctly - this requires the groups to check in with their team, and makes sure everyone is getting practice (even if one team member is significantly stronger in the language.)
2. Don't have teams hold their boards up right away, or it's too easy to copy other scores. I give a countdown to finish up, and ring a bell. You can also randomly choose a team member to show you their board. (It's pretty easy to sneakily add a missing letter or accent!)

Flippity also includes some great resources to create online flashcards and other tools, using Google sheets as templates.You can check out the resources I have already created with this tool, or easily create your own. Huge thank you to Steve Fortna for creating this resource, and to Ashley Fulks for passing it on!

Yo tengo / ¿Quién tiene? (Descripción Física)

I like using Yo Tengo / ¿Quién tiene? activities as a quick way to practice pronunciation, and an informal, low-stakes way to formatively assess individual pronunciation.

Recently I have been using this set with my 6th graders, who are practicing the physical description vocabulary we have been working with. This focuses on noun-adjective agreement (with the colors.)

Yo Tengo / ¿Quién tiene? - Descripción Física

(I cut each page into three narrow strips, and  laminated them to make them more durable.)

(All images are clip art found via Google image search.)

Hope it can be useful!

For those who have not used this type of activity before:

Culture in 3 Acts: Rethinking how I teach culture

This past week during our weekly professional development afternoon, a colleague demonstrated Dan Meyer's "3 Act" math tasks, or math stories. These inquiry based, student driven math explorations seem to be a great resource for flipped classroom models and for the kind of authentic tasks and higher level thinking that the Common Core is now requiring. Thanks to the magic of modern technology, math teachers can now find and share their own "3 Act" Math tasks, with links to prompts, standards and suggested questions.

As a Spanish teacher, I immediately began thinking of my culture lessons in 3 Acts. I already try to hook students with a fascinating image or video related to what we are learning about, and I always encourage guesses, questions, and discussions... but then I usually give them the questions that I want them to answer. If those questions were things they were actually interested in, they were driven by curiosity... and if not, they were driven by the grade carrot on a stick, if anything. In re-imagining these inquiries, I was drawn to the idea of having students drive the inquiry themselves.

I would like to adjust my culture lessons and apply some of the ideas behind the 3 Act math tasks:

• Act One: Introduce the central conflict of your story/task clearly, visually, viscerally, using as few words as possible.
• Leave no one out of your first act. It should be comprehensible to all levels. It should, as Dan Meyers says, get all students "right in the curiosity bone."
• Elicit questions from students, rather than handing them a list of questions.

In my colleague's demonstration, she categorized the questions elicited from students (in this case, teachers) by how much interest each question generates. Teachers can also try to pull out questions that fit with  specific objectives or standards. For culture lessons, I might leave it a little more open ended than in a math lesson, since culture standards are so broad. With that list of student-generated questions, there are some options. We could choose one question for students to focus on as a class, assign different questions to differentiated groups, or have students choose from a few selected questions that will address specific objectives.

• Act Two: The protagonist/student overcomes obstacles, looks for resources, and develops new tools.
• What resources do your students need to answer their questions? What tools do they need? What language do they need to answer their questions?

Teachers can try to anticipate student questions and prepare lists of resources (I often try to create differentiated lists of resources for various language levels and learning styles - I have shared some here on this blog.) However, in authentic inquiries, students need to look for information on their own. I might help students come up with authentic (and not-so-authentic) sources of information. We might brainstorm search terms in the target language. I might introduce Act 1 in the classroom, and then set students loose to answer their questions, in the computer lab or at home.

• Act Three: Resolve the conflict and set up a sequel/extension.
• The resolution should be a satisfactory payoff for students. (In Meyer's example task, he highlights the difference between actually seeing the basketball go through the hoop, and reading in the answer key - "The ball goes in.")
• Have students share the answers to their questions, and their process for finding those answers.

Using the  list of student generated questions from Act 1, and further curiosity generated by their investigations, this could easily open up extension activities and "sequels."

Many teachers are used to handing students questions, along with some set tools and formulas to answer those questions. In flipped classrooms and inquiry-based lessons, it is up to the students to select the tools they need to meet their objectives... and when students generate the questions themselves (after being motivated with a fascinating hook) they will be much more eager to find the answers. As a language and culture teacher, I want to develop independent language learners... and students who can independently find new information about other cultures, fueled by genuine curiosity.

I already am scheming up some new culture lessons in this format... I'm guessing my next attempt will be some inquiries about Semana Santa, perhaps starting with this great video. I'd love to hear from others, and perhaps collaborate on a database of resources. (Math teachers aren't the only ones who can collaborate!)

Los colores y las perspectivas de género

It's project time in middle school, and I am learning a lot along with them. Two of my students wrote a skit for their opiniones project, which takes place in a dress shop and has a fair amount of bridezilla drama in it. They wanted to know how to say the color "eggshell" in Spanish, which took us on a detailed journey of color palettes in Spanish. I ended up learning about the name of some specific shades in Spanish.

I also found this graphic, which I am using today as a writing and discussion prompt for my 7th and 8th graders. I'm hoping it can spark some interesting discussions. As a woman who is a language teacher (not an artist or an interior designer) I don't think I could name all the shades described... in my native language or my second language!

(Thanks to the community over at Wordreference for helping me with the eggshell question, by the way!)