Rewards in the Secondary Classroom?

I play a number of games in my classroom, or at minimum incorporate numerous game-like activities, and as a result, I do not use or give my students rewards for "winning." However, recently I have been wondering if using rewards on the occasion would be beneficial. Here are the reasons I have for not using rewards in the classroom:

- I want my students to partake in my classroom activities or games with the understanding that the reward is solidifying and learning the material, while being happily engaged in class.

- I would prefer that the activity is about the information and not the competition (although, here I must add that plenty of the games or game-like activities that I use are not super competitive).

- I don't want students to play/participate only because they are expecting a reward at the end.

- I don't want a student to hesitate to participate for fear of making his/her team lose out on a reward.

- I personally don't want the pressure of determining, keeping track of, and paying for the rewards.

- I want my students to learn to take joy in the classroom activities without needing an extrinsic motivator to make it worth their while.

What about you? Do you use rewards in your language classroom? What are the pros and cons in your opinion?

Movement

I think that along with having students as engaged in class as possible, movement can and should play a large role in the language classroom. I am not necessarily saying that one must be a TPRS expert in order have a great language classroom because I am certainly not an expert in this area, but opportunities should be created for students to move and interact. Here are some of the ways that I have students move (and often speak) in my classroom.

Inside/outside circle- I have also heard this format called a choo choo train or a wheel and spoke format.  Half of the class is assigned to different spots in the room and the other half faces the outer circle. For my beginning Spanish students, I give an easy speaking prompt: tell your partner five things that you did yesterday; describe yourself in 20 words; describe a movie or a book that you saw/read recently; say what you ate for breakfast; talk about your favorite activities in elementary school. etc.

With older students, the prompts can become more complex: compare the school's recycling program to your habits at home; describe the ideal candidate for student council; describe your ideal prom date; compare your study habits with your partner's; describe your ideal college; etc.


Cocktail Party- Once again, there are many activities that can be run in cocktail party style. Some ideas include: putting a word, celebrity, famous painting, building, etc. on the student's back and have them survey their classmates at random until they are able to guess the item on their back. Another option, is to have advanced students write their own questions about a topic that has been studied, and conduct an informal survey of their classmates that is then reported back to the class. For example, in the environmental unit, I asked my upper level students to write their own questions regarding their interactions with the environment, living green, time spent in nature, etc.

Role Play/Improvisation: I will often create a series of conversation cards that pertain to the unit that we are studying, then at the beginning or ending of class, a few students will be selected to choose a card at random and act out the conversation. Later in the year, I ask the students to create their own conversation task cards and the conversations often become much more exciting!

Fun elementary school activities that involve movement:
Scavenger hunt- Spring is a great time for students to do a scavenger hunt inside the school building, outside during recess (if permitted), or even just in the classroom.  I will ask students to look for letter sounds, specific vocabulary words, or different patterns.

Duck Duck Goose (or grey duck) Everyone seems to love this game, and it can be modified for lots of different vocabulary practices. For example, once students know colors, they could have to say different animals for each person, or any other series of vocabulary words, as long as the "trigger" for running has been previously established.

What time is it Mr. Fox? Once again, a favorite game that can easily be converted into Spanish, and played in the classroom. If students have already learned time, they can ask the fox other questions. What color are you wearing? and advance a step for each question asked.

The possibilities are endless for connecting movement and learning! What do you do in your classroom?

Projects in Spanish I

While my school leans towards the more traditional paper/pencil tests, I try to incorporate projects for our major themes, as I think that they are extremely valuable for students on a number of levels. First, I fully get to be the "guide on the side," as opposed to the "sage on the stage," which is a philosophy that I completely agree with. Second, students often push themselves to use new words or grammatical structures in order to accomplish the task, and that is part of learning how to learn a language, and third, students consolidate and use the information that they have learned in a meaningful way. So, this year in Spanish I, we have completed the following projects:

1) Fashion show and fashion blogger to accompany our clothing unit. The students "fashion blogged" about trends and pictures that they found on the internet. I encouraged my male students to look at their favorite sports stars. A plus to this project is that students were really excited to learn adjectives such as gross, or amazing. 

2) Ideal house project (the guide and rubric are on my TPT store). Students write about and create their ideal house using house, place, and preposition vocabulary. 

3) Create a restaurant and commercial projects. The students made a commercial on healthy living and created their own restaurant. 

4) Ideal student or ideal athlete project. Students described what the ideal student or ideal athlete "has to do" in order to maintain their abilities. 

In the upcoming weeks, we will start the preterit tense, so I am contemplating having the students create a "day in the life of a ____ student" video. The narration could all be in the past tense, and my students would most certainly enjoy the excuse to use their phones at school! 

What are your favorite projects? 

5 excuses to not use Authentic Materials

What a week it has been and its only Wednesday! The students are crazy about the upcoming spring break, I am desperately trying to get all of my grading caught-up in anticipation of the break, and on top of it all, like all teachers, I am attempting to develop good lessons.

For those that read my blog, you know that I truly believe in using authentic materials in the classroom, so this post is a bit facetious, yet, I can come-up with several excuses as to why I don't always use authentic materials in the classroom (as much as I wish that I did). So here are my top 5 excuses:

1) Time time and more time- finding authentic materials and developing appropriate tasks to accompany them is well nothing short of time consuming.

2) Appropriateness- many of the materials or songs that I think teens would love have drugs, gangs, sex, or other information that I simply cannot use or show in my classroom.

3) Language level- I can't find anything that my Spanish I and II students can realistically gain from

4) I'm Tired- yep I said it. Although every language teacher that I have ever met seems to have an incredible amount of energy, even compared to our peers who teach other subjects, sometimes, I am tired.

5) Lack of Creativity- I can't think of any new task to accompany an authentic text, and if the task isn't worthwhile then neither is the text.

These are my top five excuses. What are yours? What do you do when you have no more time or energy to find the text that you want to use?

What Can They Read?

I find this time of year challenging for many reasons in my Spanish I class. The students are anxious for some sun and exercise, and they begin to lose their enthusiasm for language class, as the novelty of the material has begun to wear off. Some of them are beginning to feel frustrated by the fact that they can't speak fluently (certainly an unrealistic goal, but one that many people in the US seem to have), and others are frustrated that they still don't understand one of the topics that we have covered. To beat some of the winter blah's I try to have my students read more. Reading authentic texts both allows them to connect with the target culture, and I find that it can create some enthusiasm as the students know that they aren't reading "baby texts."

Here are some of the items that we read in my class: menus, real estate advertisements, subtitles on commercials such as car and household appliances, where students can quickly see cognates like velocidad. Other slightly more challenging reads include: riddles, tweets and facebook posts. Then, for the students who are really certain that they can't learn Spanish and never will, I will pull in articles on teen perspective from People in español and articles from National Geographic children. Hopefully even the most reluctant student is now feeling more inspired about his or her abilities.

While I know that I am still starting small, I find that students can figure-out the majority of the meaning of each of the above items, when scaffolded and encouraged. Take riddles for example, many of them actually include rather simple vocabulary and the answer is often a simple word as well!

Articles from People and National Geographic can be more challenging. I admit that I have had greatest success with the ones from National Geographic, as I can choose articles that relate to science information that the students already know. Additionally, many scientific words are cognates in English so students can often recognize the majority of the words in a passage without needing to look-up key terms.

Once my students have read an article, obviously we need to do something with it. I find that making graphs, charts, Venn diagrams, or word webs are all realistic tasks for a level one student. Sometimes, I will have the students survey their classmates as to which product they would buy, if we read advertisements. These tasks do not ask them to produce complex language structures, nor do they need tons of vocabulary.

What do you do to beat the winter blahs? What do your students read?

Songs!

Like most Spanish teachers I imagine, I am constantly looking for new music to incorporate into my classes. I try to expose my students both to popular artists (Juanes, Shakira, Alejandro Sanz etc) as well as some lesser known artists that may be up and coming (Jesse and Joy, Banda Radial). While probably the most popular exercise to do with songs are cloze exercises, I find that for many students these exercises can take away some of the enjoyment of listening to the song in an authentic manner, which is to just listen and absorb. So, while I continue to use cloze exercises with songs, I try to only use a Cloze exercise with one in every three songs or so.

This year, I have been fortunate that my Spanish II class enjoys sappy music. Unfortunately for me, the first song I played for them this year was Qué tengo que ofrecerte by Banda Radial and they LOVED it. I say unfortunately for me because now every time that I play any song for them, they request that I play that one too. I did not use a Cloze exercise with this song, instead, I had students listen to the song twice and then based on what they heard and what they saw on the  youtube video, I had them give their opinion whether the song was happy or sad. Most of the students backed-up their opinion by using the video as evidence. However, the class was split regarding their opinion of the song. The next thing that I did was give groups of student the entire lyrics. The students read through the lyrics as a group to determine whether or not their opinion of the song changed. Then, each group shared with the class. While I did not do a cloze exercise with this song, I will admit that I strategically used it after the students had been studying Tener + que, and I listened in as students applied their grammatical knowledge to the task of reading and comprehending.

The second song that I used this year was Lolita Soledad by Alejandro Sanz. Once again, I used the official youtube video in class. With this song, I had the students watch the video and write the reflexive actions that Lolita did while preparing for the morning or evening. Then, I gave students the lyrics and had them determine the overall meaning of the song. Each student wrote a four sentence summary of the song and then a five sentences about their opinion of the song. I had different students share each of the three items with the class.

Most recently, I played Donde Estabas by Amaia Montero (the former lead singer of La Oreja de Van Gogh). I chose this song because she says the words rather clearly, it is the perfect song to hear the Spain Spanish accent, and my students have been struggling with the concept of incorporating and recognizing multiple verb tenses in a reading. Many of them are stuck in a Spanish I mentality of only using the most recently learned verb tense when reading/writing etc. For this song, I printed the lyrics for every student and then I had them identify the verbs by circling the ones in the imperfect, squaring the ones in the preterite, and starring the two commands. Additionally, I asked them to find where there was both a preterite and an imperfect verb in the same sentence and write and translate these sentences. Then I had students write five of their own sentences that could be "added" to the song. Each sentence had to use a different verb tense. While I didn't require that the students' sentences actually have any rhythm or a true place in the song, the students had fun writing and sharing a few "heart-broken" lines that allowed them to both play with Spanish and it accomplished my goal of having the students think about grammar in a more cohesive manner.

How do you incorporate songs into your classes? What songs do you find especially effective in the classroom as I am always looking for new ideas and new songs:) !

Literature circles

I really think that it is important that Spanish students begin reading real authentic works as soon as possible. As a result, with my eleventh grade students (A class that would mostly equate with an advanced level three or regular level four class), I developed a very intentional reading curriculum. During the first term, I used newspaper articles and current events with the students. At some point in the near future, I will post on using current events in the classroom. However, in the second term, I focus on literary works. While my students have access to the book Abriendo Paso, and we read many of the stories from this text, I also like to incorporate some element of choice. Therefore, I decided to use literature circles, much like teachers in elementary and middle school English classes. I made a list of the works that students could choose from and I created a series of worksheets which could accompany any literary work, as I knew that it would be important for my students to perceive the amount of homework as fair. The worksheets can be found at my TPT store, which is linked to the lower right hand corner of the blog. While the purpose of this post is not to promote the worksheets, I hope to give other teacher's ideas as to how literature circles can be completed without the seeming "unfair" component of different homework assignments.

Here is how I set-up the literary circles. In the class, I have informed the students that over the next twelve weeks, we will be reading six works (a work every other week). Upon the completion of the work, students will turn in the literary question worksheet, along with a personal reaction to the work that they read. The reaction specifications include items such as not summarizing the work because it is important to me that students personalize the story to their own lives. While the worksheets are all different, they contain similar elements. Some items that are included on the worksheets are asking students to find different verb tenses in the stories, or asking students to make word webs, or writing discussion questions for their literature circles. While I recognize that a two page worksheet is not overly long, I also count reading the work as part of their homework or class work, so I do not want to overload students too much as we will be continuing with grammar as well. Two days a week, students will meet with their literature circles to meet as a group and to discuss the work, their questions, items that they might write about for their reaction etc. Some days, I encourage the students to read the work together, especially in the beginning as they start new stories. Additionally. Every month, or after we have read two works, students will complete a project on one of the two works that they have read. Once again, the students are provided with numerous project ideas as to how they can both convey their knowledge of the work and add their own elements to the project.

I am generally fortunate in that my students are motivated to learn and practice speaking in Spanish, so I do not have to do too much reminding for them to try to use the target language; however, I have in the past, simply asked students to fill-out a small participation form in which students rank their use of Spanish in the class in the following manner.
4: I both stayed on task and spoke only Spanish
3: I spoke in English, but it was relevant to class and on task
2: I mostly stayed on task and mostly spoke Spanish
1: I had difficulty staying on task and speaking in Spanish

I found that having students rank themselves a few days in a row, quickly brought their conversations back into Spanish.

While I certainly recognize that a downside to completing literary circles is that students may not fully comprehend a work without a full class discussion to clarify certain elements. I generally find that students' enthusiasm for reading increases throughout the term, as they view their classmates projects and then are curious to read the story for themselves. Additionally, weaker students learn to ask me questions during the two days that they meet in-class with their groups, once they have received negative feedback on an early reaction or from the first worksheet being graded. Upon the completion of the term last year, most students viewed the literary circles positively when asked to complete an anonymous survey about the term.