Honestly, I woke up on July 1 with a flood of ideas going through my head about the school year and I thought I was going to write about it – well alas, it is now August 11, and I still have yet to write about anything from last school year. It must be something about the beginning of the month because on August 1, I also woke up in the middle of the night with a flood of ideas for the school year. As I am scanning through my social media, I see that so many people are already back in school. I don’t actually start until August 17 with students coming on August 20. 

This year, I will have a similar teaching context – teaching both Spanish 2 (mostly ninth graders) and Spanish 4 Honors. Meaning just like last year, I will be able to do a deep-dive into teaching the two preps. 

In this post, let’s chat about Spanish 2. 

Last year I taught about 80 students in my four Spanish 2 classes with Intermediate Low goals. And as I have reported for many years on my blog, the student surveys typically show a divide as to students’ preferences, likes, and dislikes in my classes. I will say, though, that most often students love storytelling and story-asking, and I really must remember that especially when I incorporate more and more content and culture.  

The mix of needs and preferences for learning is one of the challenges for me as a teacher, and in my personal opinion, I feel I must mix things up as much as possible so that I am reaching as many students as possible. So you will always find a variety of input-based activities, some task-based activities, language skill and vocabulary building activities, along with culture and content –  frankly none of the above are harming them (they just might not prefer to do it and oftentimes what they may not like doing is exactly what they might need). So here are some “new” choices that I made last year that I plan to continue this year.  

1. The required binder and daily bell ringer question. Many years ago, I stopped using a binder notebook because students just wouldn’t bring it to class. Well I now realize that I have to have boxes in the classroom where they keep their binders. So, I set up four large plastic bins where students keep their binders, and they are required to get their binder at the beginning of every class. I then provide them with a “notes sheet” each week and daily they write down the day, date, sports wins/losses, weather, and a question or vocabulary completion activity. I often think about what is my “why” for this practice? 

It provides a daily routine that is consistent and all my students can follow. This year my students were way more prepared for our calendar talk routine because they had to write down the day, date, sport events, weather, etc. It also allows me time to have them write down key structures that they will later be quizzed on in our daily quiz or that week’s Friday quiz. The three-to-five minute activity also gives me time to take attendance. 

This coming year, I am adding the question: what is going to happen tonight or during the weekend so we are working on talking about the future from day 1. You can take a look at my Weekly/Daily Notes Sheet here (I also have a similar version when I teach Spanish I classes).  

2. Magic Cards. I wrote about this last year here, and overall, I was really pleased with the practice. Since I already had students using the bell ringer routine, they had plenty of time to prepare their answers and then on certain days, I would just ask questions using the magic cards of students. If students weren’t prepared to answer when I called them randomly using the magic cards, then they would not earn an A/B for that participation day – perhaps they would earn a C or D (if they were not able to respond at all). Not only did this system help me in terms of keeping students focused but it also provided them a scaffold by providing them with the answers on the screen or the time to think through exactly what they wanted to say before being called on. The practice did everything I wanted it to do in terms of accountability and random calling on students instead of always picking the same students who had their hand raised. I will keep this practice.

3. The Friday Quizzes. I started doing a weekly quiz on Fridays that was a smaller amount of language structures that we were working with in class. These were the same vocabulary structures that would be on one of my mastery quizzes, but the concept of spreading out the structures on my mastery quizzes into four or five shorter quizzes and then later having the mastery quiz helped overall retention of language structures and the routine aided students with studying and focus. Overall, it was a hit with students. Well, I will say it was a “hit” when students just had to provide the English meaning of the words but there was a time that I started highlighting and required students to write five of the higher frequency words in Spanish – so this is when it got tougher and it was not as positive for students.  But I will say I think they were working a bit harder to learn the material. (I do require my students to study if they do not feel they are able to acquire/learn all of the language structures in class. Overall, I think many of my grading policies allow an easy time to earn a B in my class, but to earn an A there has to be effort and some skin in the game as we help students build their proficiency. For this reason I do require engagement during all of my classes and studying outside of class is required for most students. 

4. One Word Image for the win. During the second semester, we focused mostly on using past tense language, and I saved the One Word Image activity/routine until then. During four classes throughout the semester, each class created a One Word Image and did follow up shared writings with each image/character. These were all great classes with wonderful engagement and overall were positive experiences for all. One change I did was incorporating more vocabulary that was a bit richer than the novice-level language of traditional One Word Images like kind/mean and rich/poor, which helped to level up the activity for many of my students working at the Intermediate Low and Mid proficiency levels; by still using the words kind/mean and rich/poor and then defining them more, all students could still understand the essence. A few years ago I wrote about One Word Image here while taking Mike Peto’s brilliant Brazilian Portuguese class. I will make it a goal to write about One Word Image at some time these next few months. 

One of my misses during the school year that I will not continue to do is weekly Duolingo.  For the first semester, we did weekly Duolingo, and well, it did not provide the enriching language experience that I was hoping it would for students. Students were just doing it to complete it and get it done without the benefits of true learning. We stopped the practice for the second semester, and we were all happier for it. The kids who have been doing daily Duolingo for years and years still continued doing it daily and they were getting something out of it because they were committed instead of me forcing it on students.

It was my goal to keep this post short, so I am forcing myself to stop writing. So Good-bye Until Tomorrow when I continue talking about Food in Spanish 2.