It has been way longer than I'd like between blog posts. I am working on getting back to sharing on a regular basis. A campaign for local office (unfortunately, I was not successful in obtaining the position I sought) which took up a lot of my time, kept me away from blogging. But, it was also one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Something I never would have considered, even a couple of years ago, turned into such a great opportunity for learning how to step out of my comfort zone. In a way, it also was a reminder of what it is like to be a student, since I was a bit intimidated to start with and had a lot to learn. If you are considering running for office in the future, or doing something else that you never thought you were capable of, I highly recommend you go for it. I made many new friends, even while being exhausted for the better part of a few months, as a full time teacher, political candidate, wife and mom of two children.
Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming. In my 9th grade (intermediate low) honors classes, we just worked with the novel Vidas impactantes from Fluency Matters. It is written by the awesome Kristy Placido and includes six biographies of people (three of them women) under one cover. My colleagues and I approached it by starting with talking about Luis Urzúa (the shift supervisor of the Chilean miners trapped for 69 days in a mine in 2010). We shared some headlines and news stories about the event as we realized our 9th graders were born in 2004 and didn't have much memory of the story. Then, as a class, we read the Urzúa biography from Vidas impactantes. The Teacher's Guide had several extension activities which we used. Then we showed the film "The 33". The students were captivated by the story and very much struck by the portrayal of Urzúa in the film compared to what we had read in the book. That brought out some really engaging conversations, comparing the two and looking at how Hollywood films that are based on a true story are often quite different from what actually happened (another example of this that you might show in your Spanish classes is "McFarland, USA"). Then, we decided to do a jigsaw style reading of the remaining five biographies (Celia Cruz, Roberto Clemente, Julio Iglesias, Azucena Villaflor and María Reiche). Students were assigned to work with one of the biographies and then had to share what they found most interesting about the biography they had read. I would like to experiment with ways to do the sharing for next year. I am thinking of trying something more along the lines of a gallery walk or speed dating to give the task a more interpersonal feel. As a culminating activity, I created a digital escape game on the BreakoutEDU platform (I just invested in the subscription and am very happy with it). Here is a link to the game if you would like to try it out with your students. I am presenting on Digital Escape Room Games at FLENJ 2019 (on April 5, 2019), so I will be talking about creating them for language classes. On Saturday, April 6, I will be sharing my mini-grant project on Book Clubs in AP Spanish and presenting a session with the brilliant Arianne Dowd called "Building a Bridge to AP with CI". Hope to see some of you there!
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AuthorHigh school Spanish teacher in NJ. Proficiency-oriented teacher. Always looking to try new things in my classes. Foreign Language Educators of New Jersey 2019 Teacher of the Year. Archives
December 2019
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