I got to teach Spanish today! It was super fun and super exhausting--and I only taught two-20 minute classes. Phew! How did I used to do this every day!?
Mat-Su Community College has an annual "Kids 2 College" day where local fifth graders spend a day at the college and take classes. None of the kids had any prior language, so the challenge was to teach them a story starting from nothing! It's like the first day of school in Spanish 1! Unlike when I taught full-time, however, I didn't care about doing any kind of getting to know you activities, and I knew that whatever they got today would be all that they were going to get, so I wanted to make sure that the structures that I targeted were EXTREMELY high-frequency and useful for their lives. We learned "Wants" and "Has" with a few extras worked in.
Here is the basic script that I used in the demo lesson (To learn how to use story scripts, click here):
This is Alex. Alex is a boy. Alex is a smart, attractive, athletic boy. He is the perfect boy. Alex has a computer. Alex has a phone. Alex has a car. Alex doesn't have a bike. Alex wants a bike.
This is Kendra. Kendra is a girl. Kendra is a smart, attractive, athletic girl. Kendra has a bike. Alex wants Kendra's bike.
Alex says to Kendra, "I want your bike". Kendra says to Alex, "This bike is my bike." Alex steals Kendra's bike. Kendra is furious. Kendra says "Police, Police". The police arrest Alex.
After the story, we didn't have any time for the literacy step, but I sent the kids home with the illustrated reading on pages 1-2 of the document that you can download here (free). The vocab was on one side of the paper, with pronunciations, and the new story was on the back. The remaining pages of the document are the posters that I printed out to put on the board. Since I was working with elementary kids, I wanted to make sure that I used images in addition to the traditional black and blue translations because their visualization skills are still developing. Use this as a demo lesson, a first day of school lesson, for practice while being coached, or save the story and write up some accompanying tasks (translation, comprehension questions, expansion, extension, etc.) to use as a sub plan. If anyone wants to send me a translation of the reading into another language, I can format it and post that, too. Just email the translation of the text to [email protected]. Hope you find a use for it!
