Alma

Thank you to Cynthia Hintz for inspiring my Spanish 2A midterm exam! I came across this post of hers yesterday while looking through all of the resources to which my blog visitors have referred me. In the post, she describes how she used the video with her Spanish 1 students (I plan to do this also). She includes the online worksheets that she used in her classes, as well–definitely check it out!

I realized while watching the video and looking through her activities that I could very easily work in almost all of the target structures that we’ve studied thus far in Spanish 2A (I guess that’s why we focus on high frequency structures!) and that it could be easily told with a combination of regular preterite tense verbs and some of the most imperfect and irregular preterite verbs, which we have already studied.

For the midterm, my students will:

1. Watch the video once.
2. WRITING ASSESSMENT: We’ll re-watch it two more times (maybe even three if they beg!) as they write a description of the action. They must write it in the past tense to receive an ‘Advanced’ score, but can still earn ‘Proficient’ by writing it in the present tense. This is because we are just starting to transition from the receptive to productive ability when it comes to past tense, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to require that from everyone. Students must include the nine target structures that are included on the writing assessment page of the document.
3. LISTENING ASSESSMENT: (1) Students will respond to the listening comprehension questions that are included in the Teacher’s Guide portion of the midterm document (attached below). Obviously, since there is no speech in the video, I will be assessing whether or not they understand my questions. I ask that students give me the answers in English so that I eliminate the possibility of them understanding the question but not knowing how to answer it (which would be a writing assessment). By requiring that they answer with complete sentences, I can further assess the source of their confusion. (2) Students listen to a series of questions with two statements each and have to identify which happened first and which happened second in the video.
4. READING ASSESSMENT: Students will complete the (lengthy) CLOZE passage that I wrote for the video AND respond to the reading comprehension questions that are included on page 2 of the document. The comprehension questions are all translations, because students will have already seen the video multiple times and could answer any other comprehension questions based on what they’d seen, not what they’d read.
5. SPEAKING ASSESSMENT: Students will describe the photo collage that Cynthia Hintz created and included in her Alma post. The rubric is included in the exam document.

Download the exam here.