Category: Language Chunks

Essential Questions are...Essential

1/11/2017

Essential questions are a part of planning every unit, but up until this point they have really been for my benefit. They helped guide my activities and assessments and gave me a direction. But essential questions (EQ) aren’t just for me. My students need to know the essential questions so they know where we are headed and on what to focus their energy. So when we started our unit on animals, I put the EQs on post-it paper in the front of the class: How are all living things connected? Why are all living things important? I asked the students to brainstorm some ideas in Spanish and they couldn’t come up with anything – a sign I have a good EQ. What would be the point of an EQ that students can answer before the unit even begins??

We are now about half way through the unit and we revisited our EQs. Students had a better idea, but still struggled to come up with answers. We began the unit looking at the relationship between wolves and the other animals in Yellowstone through a short video called How Wolves Change Rivers.

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Word Clouds

5/31/2016

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Over the years, I’ve gone back and forth on whether I like word clouds or not. After attending Amy Lenord’s session on Liberation from the List at Central States, I decided to give them another try. Over the past few weeks, I’ve worked with the clouds in various capacities to get the most out of their use. Here are a few of the activities:

1. Introduction of vocabulary
Copy and past the content of a website into the word cloud site and create! Once the word cloud is complete, students can begin by searching for cognates and words they know. I also encourage them to make educated guesses about words based on what they already know about the language. Students can share all the words with the class, and this becomes their vocabulary list. Once students have found these words (which usually ends up being WAY more than they could imagine), have them write a short summary of what they think the website might be about. For novice mid students, you may just have them write the most important words from the cloud. Now that you’ve activated some prior knowledge, students can read through the text and do various interpretive activities.

2. Info gap activities
There are a few different ways to do info gaps with word clouds. For my 3rd graders, I created a word cloud with adjectives and asked students to highlight the words that describe themselves. Once they did that, students paired up and asked each other about the various adjectives, highlighting with a different color on the word cloud. Students finished by creating a Venn Diagram to compare themselves with their friends. This could work with any set of vocabulary in terms of likes and dislikes.

In the 5th grade, I used word clouds to condense an “All About Me” page from a blog post. I created two clouds – one for each post. Students answered questions about their post based on the cloud and then partnered up to ask and answer questions based on their cloud.

3. All About Me
Word clouds are also a great way to present information. They can be used to start the year as a way to introduce students to one another or at the end of the year to sum up the various vocabulary pieces the students learned. I find that providing a brainstorm document of some sort helps students organize their thoughts and put more information into the cloud.

4. Guess Who
A word cloud is a great way to play Guess Who? in class. Students create their cloud without their name and their classmates try to guess who it is. The other day, I had students move from cloud to cloud. Not only did they guess the name of the person, but also wrote palabras claves, key words that helped them determine to whom the cloud belonged. Some were obvious, such as the student obsessed with the Cleveland Cavaliers and Lebron James, and others were much trickier as multiple students participate in the same activities.

There are various sites you can use to create your world cloud. Here are a few that I’ve used in the past:

-Wordle: This is one of the original sites and provides you the ability to change fonts, colors, and word direction. The more times you write a word, the larger it becomes. You can copy text from websites, song lyrics, etc. It requires flash, so it cannot be used on a iPad. It often asks for updates and seems to work best on Firefox rather than Chrome or Safari.
-Tagxedo: This site is similar to Wordle, but also allows you to create the word clouds in various shapes. It also requires a plugin, but once downloaded, works just fine. It also works best on Firefox or Safari.
-Tagul: My favorite of the three at this point, Tagul works on any browser and also on the iPads. It gives more freedom than the others in that colors, fonts, and word directions can be changed for individual words or the word cloud as a whole. Tagul does require a login, but if students have Google accounts through the school, they can use them here. The benefit of logging in, however, is that the site saves your work and you can return to it later.

How do you use word clouds in class?

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Making Conversation Happen

10/14/2015

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My job as a teacher at the novice level is to provide my students with the building blocks to creating conversation. That is, to give them set questions, phrases, sentence starters, and conversation structures that they will eventually use to create their own language (pushing them into the intermediate level). Not only do I provide the language chunks, but also the opportunities to use that language. Almost every activity we do is based on creating conversation. The distinction between conversation and speaking is important, as my goal is to encourage a language exchange between two or more people, rather than a one-sided answer.

I explain to my students that conversation is like a tennis match: the goal is to volley the ball (or the language) back and forth as many times as possible.
A tennis match isn’t very exciting if one person serves and the other is unable to return the ball. The longer the volley goes, the more intriguing and exciting the game becomes. This is our goal.

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Pushing for Proficiency Through Conversation

9/28/2015

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It's the first day of school, and one of my fourth-grader says: “Are we going to learn how to speak Spanish next year?”. “No!” I respond. “You're going to learn today!” What he really wanted to ask was if he was going to speak in Spanish the same way he speaks in English. As much as I would love to tell him that by the end of fourth grade he would be fluent in Spanish, but the reality is that he won't. Until this moment, I never thought to share the proficiency guidelines put out by the American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Language (ACTFL). I just did not think it would matter to an elementary school student. The more I think about it, however, the more I see the importance. In order for our students to understand their growth potential, however, we need to be clear on what we truly expect them to do. ACTFL provides proficiency levels to help guide us through our language learning.

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Essential Questions are...Essential

Word Clouds

Making Conversation Happen

Pushing for Proficiency Through Conversation

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