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TitleKeeping Learners Engaged: Holiday Cards
SourceCASLS
Body

by Carla Consolini, CASLS Research Assistant

This activity was created for learners of all proficiency levels. It focuses on building  vocabulary and useing vocabulary to create content that is relevant and meaningful for each student.

Learning Outcomes:
Learners will be able to:

  • Identify the vocabulary used in holiday cards in the target language  
  • Create their own holiday card in the target language using greetings and/or well-wishes

Mode(s): Interpretive, Interpersonal

Materials: staying engaged video, vocabulary cloud template, reflection templates

Procedure: 

  1. Watch the staying engaged video with learners.
  2.  Provide students with different holiday cards in the target language. These can be digital examples. This list may help!
  3. Ask students to complete the vocabulary cloud template in pairs or small groups of 3-4. The goal of the template is to organize the most commonly repeated vocabulary among the different holiday cards into  clouds. For instance, learners might decide to make an adjectives cloud and a nouns cloud. For some languages, one of the clouds may include certain symbols or images (e.g., Star of David) that keep repeating. 
  4. If learners have not yet explored common structures for greetings and/or well-wishes (e.g. subjunctive mood in Spanish), it would be beneficial to introduce or review those structures using inductive reasoning with the holiday cards.
  5. Ask the groups or pairs to present the words they found in their cards and put in their vocabulary clouds. As a class, make a vocabulary list.
  6. Ask the students to use the vocabulary list as guidance to create their own holiday card to send to their families or friends. They can create these with paper and markers or digitally using Padlet or Google Jamboard.
  7. Finally, ask students to reflect on their creations using one of these reflection templates.
Publishdate2020-12-14 10:15:01