It has been a challenging school year in terms of timetabling and workload but the one thing which I am very pleased with is that I have managed to write all the scope and sequence documents for all grades and levels (yeah!), which means I more or less know which topics and structures I am going to cover with my classes over the years!
I love using songs in my lessons and I found out that my students enjoy it too! Apparently some of them even buy some of the songs! When we listen to a song in class, we listen to it several times in the week at the start of each Spanish lesson.
I have covered the past tense in Spanish with my grade 8 students (13-14 years old) this term and I want them to be able to describe past events confidently and accurately. Over my teaching experience I have found out that doing the traditional grammar exercises such as filling in the gaps with the correct verb forms does not really work with students.
Here is another story script which follows the last story about Elena trying to apologize to Pedro. This time Elena offers a present to Pedro and he has to open different packages. The focus is on the difference between “¿Por qué?
Here is another story script which follows the last story about little Pedro losing his notebook. This story has lots of repetitions to focus on "lo siento" and "no sé qué hacer". I am telling those stories using wooden ice cream sticks which the students love.
With my current grade 8, we culminated our unit about television with a creative project: to create a new TV program and present it to possible producers!
Before working on the project, we looked at different kind of TV programs in Spain and in South America which lead to different activities and which also provided with a lot of comprehensible input.
I simplified the story script I wrote about little Pedro losing his notebook to focus on “¿Dónde está?”, “No lo sé” and "es importante para...". I also changed the ending to make it more surprising and funnier to my students.