ANOTHER Easter Activity! 20 Questions!

This week is the week before Spring break for us…. Sooooo yes, it is INSANE…. I really wanted to have some fun “different” activities for us to do. I didn’t want to break into “fiestas” or “movie days” because I find that management is even MORE challenging when they aren’t in their regular routines. I wanted to stay IN Spanish.

We have continued to start every class with our FVR time  (it is FVR week but we rotate weeks 1 week FVR then one week some sort of written do now). After that, I’ve been doing different “fun” things that still keep us in the TL. The Easter Egg hunt was WILDLY successful….

Today and yesterday I tried THIS…. I want to REFLECT first… before even explaining the activity…. In the future, after seeing how it worked, I will NOT be doing this with any classes lower than a Spanish 2(ish) level…. Even with SERIOUS scaffolding, and providing the kiddos with written sentence stems and question suggestions, they REALLY spoke WAY more English than we normally do… That was just from the one or two words they kept yelling out to “guess”…. GAHHH! It drove me nutzooo!

In my higher classes however, this was INCREDIBLE!!!!

Here is a document you can use if you’d like…

Student’s homework was to bring a super tiny “something” to school. It could be anything that would fit into one of the cheap plastic dollar store eggs. They were instructed not to share that information with anyone. (As you can see in one of my classes I failed to mention that part so they all showed up knowing each other’s items!!!! I was a genius and already had “extra eggs” prepared in case kids didn’t do their homework and it only took two minutes of prep as I just put random crap from my classroom in the eggs)

In the Nombre box, they put the name of the student sitting in front of the class with me. In the Preguntas box, they kept a TALLY of the questions asked…. they didn’t write the actual questions themselves. Then in the Apuntes box, they wrote notes, (in English for lower classes and Spanish for higher) on WHAT the “cosa” or THING could be….

The goal was to guess the item before we had asked 20 questions… Super fun and a great thing to burn time before Spring Break while staying in the TL!!! 🙂

Here is a video of the activity with a lower class… you can hear the English… you can also see me get really serious and frustrated with a student and break into English MYSELF which is RARE… (Want to show you the good the bad and the ugly….) Actually, in this period I had to send a student OUT of the classroom all together to fill out a refocus form… This has only happened one other time this entire year… Sigh… The struggle was real.. For them, they didn’t see the problem.. THEY LOVED THIS idea…. but they didn’t realize what I was seeing and that was it was NOT beneficial for their acquisition and all the English and the “forced output” was too much… No, I wasn’t forcing them, and yes, they were totally comfortable, but they didn’t HAVE the language they NEEDED to be able to really circumlocute what they needed to… But wait…

Here are three videos with my higher class. It was amazing….This is the class with Cooper who should really be in a new novice class, but this is the only time he can take a language. You can hear how INCREDIBLE he is doing keeping up with these babies! 🙂 SO proud!

Hope this is useful! Tomorrow I am trying it with my baby 6th graders but I am going to scaffold it even more… I think I am going to be the one asking the questions (a la Bryce and Star of the Month….) I think it will help limit the English and we will move faster… we will see… I will let y’all know how it goes!!!

Happy Teaching, Happy Spring Breaking, and HAPPY EASTER!

Love,

La Maestra Loca