Moving forward, we will start each Monday sharing highlights from our weekend. Students were able to pick up the conjugation pattern, so if I gave them any other random verb, they could conjugate it in the past tense. We spent 6 days on this unit, practicing using the past tense in Spanish to talk about our own lives. However, they do use lots of repetitions of Spanish verbs in the past tense! Even more practice in the past tense Oh no! Did I get a ticket? I hope I didn’t get a ticket! Phew, I didn’t get a ticket. When I say I wrote stories in the past tense about my wild life, here are some examples: Lots of teachers tell me they are not creative enough to write their own stories in Spanish. This was also a lot of fun! How to write your own stories Eventually, I also asked them to write their own stories in the past tense and swap with another student to illustrate. And all the while they were receiving lots of repetitions of the first person verbs in the past tense! After they listened to my stories, they re-read and drew what happened to show comprehension. Even though they knew the stories were ridiculous, they liked making predictions about what happened to me. In my opinion, students were more engaged with these stories about my life than if I had written about someone else. You can read more about that here.įrom there, I provided more repetition and comprehensible input by just writing a story each day about my wild life! My students are hybrid, so I set up this game on Peardeck for the virtual students. The following day we did a game of running dictation, using a story we previously read about a video game playing giraffe. By pretending they were someone else, they could more creatively talk about their weekend in the past tense. To spice things up, I gave students pictures of famous people and cartoons and asked them to take the perspective of someone in the photo. So to be fair, nobody is really doing anything. Also, there is this crazy thing called Covid-19 going around and it’s currently -8º in Chicago. So getting them to spill their guts about their weekend proved a little more challenging than I anticipated. This game can be played in person or remotely! Next we played Quizlet live with the past tense verbs. We took notes and practiced making statements. You can see the complete list of the 12 verbs further down in the article, but here is a sample of our notes: Because comprehensible input classrooms rarely show students grammar or explicit conjugations, I only showed students several Spanish verbs in the past tense as vocabulary. Start each Monday class with the question “What did you do this weekend?” Getting startedįirst I needed to teach a mini unit on Spanish preterite to provide enough repetitions for students to be able to produce it on their own. While talking this over with my brilliant colleagues Carlos and Valentina, they suggested I introduce weekend chat. Yet middle school and high school students LOVE talking about themselves! And, in the real world, interpersonal communication requires students to talk about themselves! They want to talk about what they did –ahem–in the past tense! Therefore, if I want my students to be ready for the real world, how do I incorporate more first person narrative into my comprehensible input classroom? Students can tell me loads about other people, but they don’t know how to transfer that to talking about themselves. Right? This is the outline for most comprehensible input stories. However, one of the areas of teaching with comprehensible input where I struggle is the idea that almost everything we teach is in the third person. We can teach past tense in Spanish much earlier than a traditional curriculum. The good thing about teaching with comprehensible input is that we don’t really worry about when we teach the various tenses.
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