Literacy Night, Take 1

Our school is holding a "Literacy Night" on Friday evening. The goal of the evening is to provide fun, literacy-based enrichment activities for our students and their families. It will be running alongside our 6th Grade Orientation, which (as an Elective teacher) is my opportunity to recruit new students for my program. My challenge was to design an activity that (1) promotes literacy and (2) is super awesome and makes kids want to take my class. Easy enough, right? This should be no problem for a CI teacher. Wrong! The challenge that I face is that there is no structure for the time that students will be visiting my classroom. I will have potential new students, current students, and their families all wandering in and out of my room at will. Therefore, I must develop an activity that is completely self-guided and able to be completed by people that know no Spanish. My end goal was for all participants to end up being impressed with themselves for learning some Spanish. I had an idea for storytelling, in which I'd have a series of posters around the room with information and circling questions and what-not, but I haven't had the motivation to put it together yet. I ended up developing a very basic activity that talks about subjects and verbs and how they are needed in Spanish and English sentences (even though they are sometimes implied in Spanish sentences...I'll ignore that for now!). I figured that I could "sell my course" by demonstrating to parents that their children will learn English grammar and vocabulary through their study of Spanish. The activity isn't super fun, but non-Spanish speakers will probably be excited and impressed with themselves for their ability to identify unfamiliar Spanish words (even though they are cognates) and even to create sentences. In addition to the worksheet, I'll put all of the sentence-building words on the Promethean Board as well, color-coded by category (adjectives, verbs, singular nouns, plural nouns), for people to share the sentences they've formed and review them with me. Then, I can give them more information, like how adjectives follow nouns in Spanish. I think that this activity will work, but I wish I could think of something a bit more exciting. Please share ideas with me that will work with the format of the evening! Literacy night