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.

Here is a sample video: