View Content #19835

Martha Pero Halemba is a Spanish teacher at Hudson City Schools in Ohio. She is a past president of the Ohio Foreign Language Association and the current OFLA Professional Development Chair. In addition to her own classroom teaching, she trains other teachers on curriculum development.

Today's Activity of the Week exemplifies a curriculum design process that moves from a year-long proficiency-based Student Learning Objective (Novice Mid), to a theme-based unit of instruction (schools, school activities, and passtimes) whose objectives tie in with the Can-Do Statements in LinguaFolio, to a plan for an Integrated Performance Assessment at the end of the unit, to elaboration of specific activities that will prepare students for the assessment. You can see the unit plan here. Find more guidance for using SLO's here.

Learning Objectives: 

• Students can compare their schedules to a Venezuelan student’s schedule. 
• Students can recognize words, phrases, and characters when associate with things they already know.
• Students can exchange information using texts, graphs, or pictures.
• Students can exchange some personal information.

Modes:  Interpretive and Interpersonal and Presentational  (novice mid)

Materials Needed:  Schedule, Venn diagram and YouTube video

Procedure:  (Stay in the target language the whole time.)

1.  Show the Youtube video of students from the school.  (This is the hook.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=1BGJqLR8h5E

Have them read the title to try to figure out why they are dancing.  Then tell them are going to check out one of the student’s schedule and compare it to their own.

2.  In groups of two, have students try to make a list of all the classes they can understand without using a dictionary.  (You can make this a bit of a contest to see who can get the most right if you like.  My students always like to compete.)

3.  When they look like they are done, give them 5 minutes to look up any word.

4.  Go over the subjects with them. Ask them questions and guide them if you need to do so.  Explain why some of the words are different like castellano.  Have them add them to their ongoing list of new words “not in the book.” I also have them try to figure out what year this student would be in. Ask them if there are any classes we have that might stump a native Spanish speaker.

5.  Now have them fill out their schedule on the empty form. I put all the days, so they get the idea that most schools in U.S have the same schedule everyday.

6.  Using the schedules, have the students fill in the similarities and differences individually.

7.  Have students work in groups of 2 to compare their Venn diagrams with each other orally asking and answering questions being sure to stay in the target language.  (The students have an entire unit on school, so they keep the Venn diagram and keep adding information as they go.)

8.  Homework:  Using the information from the Venn, write a summary explaining what you learned.

Notes:  This is all scaffolding to allow the students to be successful in their summative IPA.