A cookie and a circular story...

One of the ways that I like to develop the writing skills of my students is by creating circular stories. Circular stories are ones where the plot becomes interlinked so that the endings leads back to the beginning. These are pretty simple to set up and seem to be a perfect fit when you are teaching “si” clauses in the upper language levels.

I like to use the idea of circular stories because it gives my students an opportunity to put on their creative hats and it really lets my students practice the conditional tense in a different way, asking them to create meaning in their own way. Students add some creative design and color to the story. The stories make a great bulletin board display and really let you showcase the great things that are happening in the classroom!

To get this lesson rolling, start out by reading the Spanish version of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff. You can use the Elmo projector or if you have a small class, sit down and have a little reading session in a cozy corner or quiet area of your school.

image found at: http://rif.scholastic.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/300x/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/1/3/13160.jpg

After reading the story with your students, have some conversation with your students about the literary technique of a circular story, and what makes this a circular story. Do students know any other circular stories? (This sort of conversation leads to valuable cross curricular connections!) Chances are the students are very familiar with this little book, and will be able to tell you about the story and will be very excited when you tell them they will be constructing their own.

I model the expectations of the assignment with the students with an example of my own that I share with you below: 

Si tocas una trompeta con un tigre por la Sra. Leidolf

Si tocas una trompeta con un tigre, escucharás más música.

Si el tigre escucha más música, querrá aprender del artista.

Si aprende más del artista, le gustará viajar al extranjero.

Si viaja al extranjero, visitará las ciudades del artista.

Si el tigre visita las ciudades del artista, aprenderá el español.

Si el tigre aprende el español, le interesará la música mariachi.

Si le interesa la música mariachi, querrá tocar la trompeta otra vez.

 Feel free to take your kids to a multimedia lab or grab some laptops where the students can do their creating online! You can use any word processing program and students can even create their own drawings using a Paint program or Web 2.0 tools. Some students may want to draw their own, or take pictures and import their own works. 

To assess this activity, you can use one of your Presentational Speaking rubric that already use. Students really enjoy creating and sharing these short circular stories with you and their classmates!

Feeling red, green, yellow and blue all over

Yesterday I successfully completed my 5th exam to become a Google Certified Educator. Phew! There are a couple of important things I learned in that process.
1. Google is all about sharing, so get together with some other interested colleagues and have some collaborative sessions. Take the tests at the same time- Google gives you all randomized tests anyhow, so no one person has the same test at any one time. The power of working with my colleagues on this was amazing- we were able to support each other in many ways!
2. You need to have some familiarity with the Google Apps. That helps get through some of the questions fairly quickly.
3. You should be able to search online quickly and effectively for the answer if you don't know it. Some of the questions can get detailed and knowing where to find the answer is key given that you have 90 minutes to answer 60 questions.

Overall a great experience and I am happy to have this as our school moves forward with 1:1 computing.

Considering other possibilities...

Given an emergency situation/evacuation at your home, 

what 3 cherished items would you take with you?

To wrap up the last week before Spring Break and end on a techy note, I took my Spanish 4h students to the Mediascape lab where they thought about this same question and what they would do. (Yes, we were studying the conditional!)

The Mediascape once again provided that rich environment for my students to create and collaborate. All I had to do to get this activity up and running was to create a Google Presentation, include the directions on the title slide, model a slide with my own ideas and share it with them. Then, each student authored 1 individual slide of the presentation, filling it in with pictures representing items they would take with them (some were even their own they had creatively downloaded- go students go!). Some even want farther and personalized their slide with different backgrounds and transitions to show off their individual likes and preferences.

Once the techy piece was in place, the students were able to move into presentation mode and share in the target language the items they would take with them and why with their table mates. So much conditional tense happening in the room it brought a smile to my face! This activity was great because it asked students to use the language to communicate about a real-world situation!