I have been taking a course at UC Berkeley for six Saturdays since September, and I finally finished my last course this past Saturday. During these courses, I have begun to move even more away from simply memorizing vocabulary and grammar and truly incorporating the material into real-world applications.
In Spanish 2, which is a combined Sophomore and Freshman class, students are learning about city vocabulary: streets, signs, turn, go straight, keep going, and also store names: fish market, fruit stand, park, supermarket, bakery, bank etc. I have also heard several of my students chatting about getting their licenses, or taking their permit tests…or failing their license tests.. 🙁
AND THEN I HAD AN EPIPHANY:
I wanted to make city vocabulary as real as possible for my students.
In groups of 3-5, I had my students open Google Earth and investigate a city in Latin America that they had heard of, or that they were interested in. They basically virtually traveled through all of Latin America, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Spain and were able to see street names and people’s houses, and a lot of trees. They also got side tracked and searched for their own houses and Carondelet as well…but back to the assignment.
Once students became excited about looking at cities through Google Earth, I had them pick a city and try to replicate it in the most basic from onto butcher paper. Some students drew Cartagena in Colombia, others drew cities in Mexico and Puerto Rico.
They drew streets, and labeled the street names and round abouts etc.
Next, they researched common shops based on the vocabulary that they could find in or around the city. They were able to make cultural comparisons and realize that there is a CROCS store here in the US, but also in Colombia, and the students were surprised to see this. They labeled their stores with the Spanish word, for example: pescadería for fish market, and they labeled the name of the market.
Next students, learned the “nosotros” commands “Let’s drive” “Let’s go” and they also practiced their informal commands as well. Once they were relatively comfortable with their commands, students finished coloring their maps.
When the maps were complete, each group received a “Hot Wheels” car that I had gone out and purchased. They got to pick their cars: the truck, the garbage truck, the race car, and they were excited to drive their cars.
Students took turns filming each other giving one another directions using commands and listening and “driving” their cars according to the directions their peer was giving them to get from one place to another. Students had a blast doing this activity and they were able to integrate culture, grammar, and vocabulary into a fun, innovative, creative project in a group.
What surprised me the most, is that students went completely off script and started to spontaneously incorporate vocabulary from earlier chapters. They decided to make their cars have accidents and they needed to go to the hospital because the driver had an injury. Hospital and injury vocabulary happened way back in chapter 1, however students were still able to recollect the information and use it in an unrehearsed in a spontaneous way to make a story with their maps. This is what pleased me the most. As a language teacher, my goal is to have my students produce the language as spontaneously and unscripted as possible, and they became excited to create their own individual scenarios spontaneously.
Overall, I enjoyed this assignment, and so did my students. I got a lot of great feedback that they were able to use real-world applications in class. 1 week later, I quickly quizzed students on the vocabulary and the commands, and they were all able to produce accurate answers without having studied before.
My Spanish 2 students are practicing body and hospital vocabulary and also the different past tenses and uses. To practice body vocabulary, I engaged students in a whole TPRS body part identification game, and ultimately playing “Simon Says”. The next activity was for students to take out their ipads and I described a “monster” to them. I described the monster saying “the monster has four arms, and six eyes, and three eyes are red” (in Spanish). Students then drew what they heard on their ipads for listening comprehension practice. Once that was finished, students were to create their own monsters at home, and draw and describe in sentences “My monster has five legs…” etc.
Once all of the students created their monsters, I divided them up into their family groups of four, and they worked together to create a story, with their original monsters, and other vocabulary from the chapter. The results were entertaining, and the girls had a great time creating their stories and drawing their monsters. Interestingly, I found that many of their stories were based on monsters feeling “alone” and that they didn’t have any friends. It’s definitely something to consider and how some of my students may be feeling trying to navigate through high school.
This was a great activity for kinesthetic fully body response, listening comprehension, creativity, artistic skills, practicing vocabulary and collaborating with classmates.
Here are some of the pages taken from their stories:
I was inspired by Martin Cisneros’s Google Summit presentation (Carondelet, Aug. 5) “Making Thinking Visible.” Though his session was aimed at teaching ELL students, I’m convinced some of the sketching strategies he shared would benefit all students.
After Cisneros shared research that people are more likely to remember something if they draw it, I was sold on the idea of incorporating more sketching into my curriculum. What if we had all are students DRAW their notes? Or, as Martin more boldly posed, “What if we had them draw their final exams?” (I’m not there yet…)
For ELL students, drawing can be a powerful way to demonstrate knowledge. As Cisneros explains, drawing is also a fundamental element to learning necessary academic language. As his slide pictures below, learning is more than reading and writing – it is visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and emotional. To best equip ELLs to master their academic language, they need to have the opportunity to engage with the target language in these rich and varied ways.
Digital sketchpads can be a key ingredient to making learning more dynamic. There are so many digital sketchpads out there: Notability, Awwap.com. “Notes” app on iPad all work. My favorite is Google’s Autodraw because it has a machine learning feature that guesses what you’re drawing and actually draws it better!
My flower:
AutoDraw’s Machine Learning flower:
Exactly what I was going for. 🙂 I actually have mixed feelings about the AutoDraw feature. Not everything has to be perfect… But sometimes it’s nice to have your drawings “shine” as Cisneros says.
Here are three ways I think I’ll use sketchpadding after this session:
1. Have students sketchnote a passage from a text.
2. Have students sketchnote a portion of class discussion
3. Have students sketchnote directions, complex process to check for understanding
4. Have students sketchnote what they learned in class at the end of class.
Does anybody else use digital sketchpads in their classrooms? Would love to hear what you’ve tried out or are thinking of trying out.
