Question of the Week: Celebrations

This week we discuss ways to recognize students at the end of the year.

End of Year Resources

With the end of the year fast approaching, here are some activities to help you plan the final days.

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French 1 Review Packet

This French 1 Review Packet is a great resource to provide students at the end of the semester to review for the final exam or over the summer months before they begin French 2. All questions are written in French.  27 page download.

(FREE) Communicative activity: Summer Vacation Write, Draw, Pass

In this activity, students can play a game using original sentences about summer vacation or one of the 30 pre-made Spanish sentences (English translations provided so that teachers of other languages can adapt the activity for their classes). In the game, students interpret pictures and sentences from their classmates to figure out what everyone will be doing this summer. Works great to practice ir + a + infinitive! Detailed instructions are included for the game and for several possible extensions. 

Spanish Summer Workbook by Spanish Sundries

This workbook contains over 16 activities covering some of the most common themes from beginning Spanish. Although constructed as a tool to keep students skills sharp over the summer break, these activities could just as easily be used throughout the school year in class, as homework, or as sub plans.

 

Les Certificats by Madame H
These are the perfect certificates to award your French students of any level at the end of the school year! The download includes seven different designs with the same wording, a place to write student name, school attended, and teacher. All wording is in French. There are 2 colored designs (blue, red) and 5 black and white designs. Pick and choose for different levels you teach or use the same one for all of your students.  

Spanish Future Tense - Este Verano

When thoughts turn to summer vacation, use this end of year activity to review the future tense. Students and teacher stand and circulate with their list of questions, trying to find “yes” answers to questions about what students will do this summer, next week or tomorrow. They can only ask two questions per person so they must choose their questions wisely. Students sit down as soon as they have “yes” answers to all questions (or when they have questioned everyone).

Guess Who? in Spanish Game Clue sheet for students

For students playing the game "Guess Who?" to practice asking about people's descriptions, I give students a laminated copy of this sheet for them to remember the correct vocabulary including: hair colors, eye colors, size of hair/nose, if they are man/woman, if they have a mustache or beard, etc.

No English is used on the sheet. Each word has a picture next to the Spanish word.

Using the verb "TENER" or "SER" to describe physical appearance or characteristics.

World Cup in World Language classroom

Many World Language teachers are using this summer's upcoming World Cup in Brazil to provide their students with a learning experience about the world's most popular sporting event and one that is a huge cultural event for many target cultures. Here are some resources to get you started. 

 

Futbol y Copa Mundial Unit

Great end of the year activity and perfect leading up to this summer World Cup (Copa Mundial) which is the world's largest sporting event and kicks off June 12. Have your students learn about this important world culture event before they head home for summer.
This 12 page packet features a 4 page webquest where students will find out information about the tournament, the teams, and its history. Also features 4 songs including the 2010 World Cup anthem by Shakira and 2 World Cup songs from this year 2014 Fifa World Cup as well as an inspiring song about Mexico's national team.

World Cup Spanish Picture Flash Cards & Games

A picture, and these World Cup pictures, can be used 1,000 different ways! All levels of Spanish students can use and play with the Soccer People and Places and Soccer Verbs picture flash cards. ANSWER KEYS INCLUDED. Learners can play independently or with the class or groups. Get in on the World Cup excitement.  

Monday Freebies 5/19

Querer + Infinitive Practice Worksheet
Practice the verb querer combined with an infinitive. Includes fill-in-the-blank, translation, and responding to questions. Great for beginning Spanish students practicing creating simple sentences.

Spanish reading comprehension: Conocemos a Lucia
An easy reading comprehension exercise about a Spanish teenager.(True/False and answer the questions) 2 pages.

It includes family, age, likes, dislikes, and physical description.

Daily Routine - Reflexives - Alejandro Sanz song

Using the song "Lola Soledad" by Alejandro Sanz, students will write Lola's daily routine. They must think about whether each activity requires a reflexive verb or not, then write an original sentence in the third person singular. A list of verbs and transition words is provided so that their work will have continuity and read like a story. A link to the music video is included.

Preterite of AR verbs

4 page packet describing the difference between presente tense and past tense (preterite/preterito) for -AR verbs including the irregular -Car, -Gar, -Zar verbs.

Answers included for partial notes portion (Additional pages)

Completely Free Packet, ready to use. Print, make copies, and use in your class today!

If you like this packet, try our guided notes for -ER, IR verbs!

Organizadores gráficos ( Free Spanish Graphic Organizers Common Core Aligned )

For 2nd-5th grade: A set of 2 graphic organizers entirely written in Spanish. They are specially designed for teaching and practicing problem and solution in both narrative and informational text.

Question of the Week: Absences

This week's question, submitted by a guest, was: How do you use your classtime effectively when you have multiple students missing class due to a school function? Whether it be a field trip, a sporting event, a club meeting, or other school responsibility that forces a group of students to miss class, we still must continue teaching to the students who are present.

Our teachers had some great enrichment activities for the students who were in class to further their language skills, while not creating something that the missing students would have to make up. Here's what our teachers had to say:

Foreign Language Resources 5/14

As the school year winds down, many of us are looking for end of the year activities, review games, and final assessments. Here's some that hopefully give you less stress at the end of the year:

German Speaking Activities, Test, Oral Exam for Midyear, Midterm or Final Exams

These German Speaking Activities are perfect for midyear, midterm, and/or final exams. This German Oral Exam includes 40 situations to ask your students such as:

There is a wide range in the situations from basic to advanced intermediate (using past tense to tell a story). I usually use these questions with my foreign language levels 2-4 students. These German Speaking Test also include teacher tips and a foreign language speaking rubric for grading the exam.
Check out our other languages, including Portugues, Spanish, & French.

French End of Year Game - Parlez ou Pantomime

This fast-paced game makes a fun semester or year end review for French students who have just one minute to give oral clues or gestures, hoping their team can guess the six words in a category (verbs, clothing, foods, animals, professions, places, feelings, transportation, sports and more). Targets multiple intelligences: bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal and linguistic.  

La Primavera Activity Set {Spanish}

This product will help you and your students learn vocabulary related to the spring season.
Vocabulary: la mariposa, el conejo, el árbol, el pájaro, la lluvia, la cometa, el pollito, la flor, la primavera

This set includes:
1. E-Book: La Primavera
2. Counting Flash Cards (1-10)
3. Memory Game (9 pairs):
4. Coloring Book
5. Coloring Page

Expresate 1 Spanish Final Exam

Expresate One Final Exam (8th Grade Level 1, High School Level 1 Semester 2)
This zipped file includes:
- Listening/Reading Document
- 83 Question Multiple Choice Document
- Study Guide of what topics are on the test

Spanish Review Game Cuatro En Linea - Four in a Row, Connect Four

Learn, practice, PRODUCE! Help your students practice their Spanish speaking skills with this fun game, "Cuatro En Linea!"

This game works just like the "Connect Four" game many of us played as children, but with a Spanish twist!

This 9 page packet includes:

-clear instructions
-2 sets of instruction cards to laminate and hand out to partner pairs
-2 pre-made game boards with Spanish questions (beginner's level)
-2 BLANK game boards!! You can fill in these game boards to suit your classroom needs and help your students practice ANY level of Spanish!

Check back next week for even more end of year activities.

Tolerance Video

We like to highlight blog posts from our Members' Blogs. This week we feature a post from SpanishPlans.org.

"After the music video, we talked about the message of the video about being accepting of others, and standing up for people. I think this is a great video for teaching tolerance and it also tied in nicely to our recent unit of positive and negative commands.

However, the video flashed those “posters” quite quickly, probably too quickly for a novice learning to be able to read and/or understand. I have taken screen shots of a majority of the posters and compiled them for free download "

To find out this what song this in and get the link to download the free powerpoint, following this link to Spanish Plan's post.

French Freebies May 12

This week we feature 5 French Freebies!


Les activités du printemps: Les petites affiches

This freebie contains 12 posters of various spring activities children like to do. Also included are the additional vocabulary cards: faire du vélo and jouer au soccer if you prefer to teach these alternatives.

I use these cards in several different ways: as posters on my bulletin board, as flashcards to play charades, vocabulary reference cards at a writing center or I print them four to a page and make cards for Go Fish or memory.

French Shoe Verb Mini Posters (Set 1) Three French shoe verb visuals to create a bulletin board to enhance learning. A sports figure delightfully illustrates what happens when the stem of these stem changing verbs is stressed. A second mini-poster has a sports shoe in which the verb is conjugated. A third mini-poster lists some verbs that follow the shoe verb #1 conjugation pattern. As the saying goes, un dessin vaut mieux qu’un long discours (a picture is worth a thousand words).

Activité d'antonyme : Les granges

Dans cette activité qui combinent l'art avec la grammaire, les élèves doivent creuser leurs têtes (ou utiliser un dictionaire de synonymes!) pour trouver des antonymes aux mots simples qu'ils utilisent dans leurs écrits.

French Prices & Currencies

This is a series of brief worksheets related to money and prices in French-speaking places. the first identifies the differences between how prices are written in English and in French (using the dollar as the currency unit).

The second identifies the currency of about 25 countries where French is a national language. There are two versions of this worksheet so you can select the level right for your students, as well as which information you would like them to research.

The third engages some critical thinking skills as students calculate what the price of certain souvenirs in francophone countries would be in American dollars, and then discuss alternatives in terms of their preferences in spending a limited amount of money.

Le Rasisme: Epreuve 2  

This is an essay test in the form of an IB French B Épreuve 2 on the topic of racism. There are four prompts of which students must choose 1 and create a 250 word essay in 90 minutes. Students need to be familiar with the music of Diam's and the film La Haine. 

Class Mascot Activity

Here’s a fun idea for any world language classroom – it’s amazing how having your own kids in school inspires you. Got this class mascot idea from my daughter’s kindergarten class.

Find a stuffed animal, doll, inflatable monster, gnome, etc. to be your class mascot/exchange student. Pick a different mascot for each class that you have.  Let the students name him and decide where he’s from, why he’s here, what his family is like, etc. Each week, a student gets to take him home and take pictures of him doing activities. Give the student a sheet of paper with lines to write 10 sentences about what the mascot did and a rectangle for a 4×6 picture on the front and blank space on the back for additional pictures. Keep a different color binder with plastic insert pages of the student’s work and pictures for each class.  The other classes will be interested in seeing what all the mascots are doing.

When you talk about weekend activities on Mondays with your class, the student of the week is responsible for talking about what the mascot did and showing off the pictures. The student should bring the mascot to school every day so that he can sit in class and learn the language. Let the mascot be part of class activities when appropriate (games, reading in a funny voice, etc.).  You can also make a flat version of the mascot and have students take pictures of him/her in other random places, cities, or countries.

Written by World Langauge Café

Question of the Week 5/1

Thursdays on Language Teachers' Café we bring you a guest blog post, a feature on a WL teacher, hot topics in World Language, or, this week, a Question of the Week answered by our panel of teachers.
This week, the question was "How has being able to communicate in another language impacted your life"? I think the answers to these question clearly show how valuable learning and knowing another foreign language can be. Share this answers with your students and let them know the opportunities that await them!