In my fellowship, I worked with DPI to find, evaluate and upload open educational resources to School Net. My focus while researching was on elementary Spanish resources, but if I came across a resource that would fit older students, I would tag it as well.
So, I don’t have a single lesson that I implemented. Rather, I have had the opportunity to incorporate several pieces of my externship into my classes as they become relevant. I have been able to incorporate lots of practices from my Kenan Fellowship into my classes this year (my personal favorite being the training we received on creating valid assessments), and some really excellent additions have been adapted from resources I found during my externship.
One of my favorite resources is a lesson plan called “Eyewitness”. It was found on the LEARN NC website and was easily adaptable to all languages. The lesson allows students to describe people’s physical appearances, and I adapted it to be included in my unit on clothing and shopping by altering the vocabulary requirements. I like that the activity within the lesson has so many modes of learning-listening, speaking, and to some extent, negotiating meaning. In the activity, students describe a character to their partner, who acts as a police sketch artist and draws them out in detail. Students can ask clarifying questions, so the activity becomes interpretive in nature. Here’s an example:
During the lesson, students were very engaged and interested to see if their sketches matched the describer’s sketch. I wish I had more time for the lesson (40 minutes is not a lot of time for an activity that varies so much from pair to pair depending on their levels of readiness), so next time I think the lesson should be split. The preparation portion of the activity can be completed in advance as homework, and I can have some spare characters that I have created in case anyone forgets their homework on that day.
Although we located several lesson plans for School Net, there were many different types of resources. Interactive web-based activities, images, songs, or video could be the inspiration for a lesson. I came across this excellent video on Youtube:
The video is of a Spanish-speaking woman from Spain narrating her actions as she makes a tomato-based soup to be served cold. My students’ materials and resources don’t often include native speakers from Spain, so I think the video gave excellent exposure to an unfamiliar accent. Although I tagged this video and uploaded it to School Net early on in my search, the tagging and uploading of YouTube videos was discouraged later in the process by our mentors, which I disagree with –most teachers know how to use, and do use, YouTube appropriately in their classrooms. But when uploading resources, it is important to be able to cite all owners and creators of materials for copyright purposes.
The video inspired a lesson called “Catadores”, or “Taste-Testers”, in which students got to try three types of street food popular in Spanish-speaking countries and react to those foods. Student helpers served chicharrones (fried pork pieces), gazpacho, and frutas con chile en polvo (fruit with lime juice and chili powder). Students reacted to the foods by first holding up color-coded sheets of paper with appropriate adjectives in the target language. Then, they responded in writing to a few questions about each food. Finally, they chose one of the street foods to write a review on in the target language. When they tried gazpacho, the students did a listening activity with the YouTube video mentioned above.
Although the nature of my fellowship and externship did not allow for much depth within one particular lesson, I am starting to appreciate the fact that I have found so many lessons and inspirations for lessons that are now just a few short clicks away from any NC teacher who chooses to peruse School Net.