A Proficiency Based Unit on Legends
Spanish 2 is typically when students start learning the difference between the preterite and the imperfect and how to use them correctly. I love this time because students can start understanding stories and with a lot of help, can start telling them as well. This year I decided to take the textbook legends unit and expand upon it to create a story-rich experience at the end of Spanish 2.
I needed a lot of help in this endeavor, so I searched the internet for ideas and came across some brilliant products that greatly helped me in designing this unit. First was a list of vocabulary from Amy Lenord that gave students important synonyms (so students wouldn't keep saying "he said" and "she said" over and over again) as well as transitions and phrases that would make their writing and speaking more interesting. Another helpful tool was Martina Bex, who has some amazing stories on Teachers Pay Teachers. I downloaded the "la llorona assessment" for free and also purchased the "el que se enoja se pierde" reading.
First: The Basics
Students started with some vocabulary practice. They had to learn how to talk about characters and settings. They also needed a lot more verbs to discuss actions. I used quizlet live to introduce tons of new vocabulary and students were incredibly engaged learning the new words. (You can click here to find my other post about how to use quizlet live in the language classroom to help with circumlocution and fluency). They also needed to review the preterite and imperfect. I used more of Martina Bex's resources as well as some of my own.
Second: Reading
After students had enough vocabulary and understanding of the past tenses to discuss and understand stories we started reading. We read "el que se enoja se pierde" as a class. I used a much abbreviated version of the activity just due to the time constraint of the end of the year. Once students felt confident with their reading skills I gave them "la llorona" as a homework assignment. They had a week to complete the reading. We then went over it as a class and discussed strategies that students used for reading such as guessing words in context, highlighting and labeling the quotes. As a reading test, we read the story of "Popo and Ixta" that came with our textbook, Avancemos. Students did very well and were loving that they now knew 3 stories, two of which were culturally authentic.
Third: Listening
Now that students had read some stories and felt confident, I wanted them to practice listening to stories (which can be more of a challenge). We started with videos of common stories like Caperucita Roja-this video is great because it has cute drawings and the students love the little kid's voice. We then did some other listening activities from the textbook that dealt with Popo and Ixta. The background that students already had was helpful in their understanding of the audio. We finished up our listening practice with a movie. La Leyenda de la Llorona is a great Mexican movie. It is hard to find a version with subtitles, but the students actually understand a lot of what is going on and feel accomplished by understanding so much without subtitles. You can find the guide that we used here. It helps students show their understanding of the movie and allows them to compare this version to the version they read from Martina Bex. The students had enough background knowledge after reading the story that they understood the movie and could truly enjoy it.
Fourth: Writing and Speaking
After listening and reading to different stories over the course of a couple of weeks, students were itching to get started with their own stories. We started slow. I had students use images from elementary school story-telling activities to write simple stories in the past. At first we used the same image, and could compare our stories and help each other use the super synonyms and transitions from Amy Lenord to create better stories. Then students had their own stories to tell from the images. We also practiced speaking with conversation cards (find the blog post here) that allowed students to practice the preterite and imperfect by answering questions about themselves (also kept the vocabulary limited to what they knew more or less). Then students wrote paragraphs about stories in their past (about their favorite teacher in elementary school or their favorite birthday party). They also described pictures that I provided for them, describing what happened.
Culminating Project: Write a Story
After all of that practice, I was excited to see what the students could do on their own! They self-selected their groups of 3 and using storybird.com they chose their images to create a book from. I chose this site because it requires students to choose their images before writing. I found that students were more creative when provided with the images then if they had to create the story from scratch. The site had some negatives though. For example, only 2 students can collaborate on a project so the group size in my class was too big (more of an issue of my planning than of the sites, but it would be convenient to have more collaborators). Some students complained that they had to chose images and could not create their own, but most students were appreciative that they did not have to do any art. This allowed them to focus more on the story creating than the art part (and with limited time, I had to make some choices). The students created drafts with google docs and after I helped them edits their drafts, they copy and pasted the final product into storybird, where their images were. I paid $20 and was able to download all of their stories as PDFs, which I printed at school and bound to a book that I can put on my bookshelf. the students were very excited to see their project bound and printed and I am excited to have them on my bookshelf for years to come.
The students told me this was one of their favorite units. I think it was because they had a final product that was tangible and that they were proud of! I wish I had had more time to scaffold the writing process more, but I was impressed with the way they truly thought about which tense to use and used what they read to model how they wrote.
I would love to see how you incorporate stories into your curriculum! How do you have students write stories? What readings and listening activities have you prepared to help students get the input that they need to be able to produce stories on their own?
