Just keepin' it real.

I have been varying the amount of homework I give students at the beginning of the year, partly because we are reviewing or learning introductory language.  It is also partly because I want to change how I assign homework, so that students can make the best use of the language in practice, have a variety of assignments, and can feel successful in their effort and output.

This week in middle school (8th grade, reviewing before getting into Spanish 2) as a class we made a list of feelings and emotions.  The students came up with a list of eleven, including excited, sad, and angry.  I had students take out their Chromebooks (we are a one-to-one school with this technology) to take selfies.  What a look they gave me!  A teacher telling them to take a selfie?  Unheard of!  They took a selfie to represent each feeling and then saved the pictures in categorized shared folders via Google Drive.  Of course, I participated as well.

Examples of my selfies:

My students had a riotous good time!  The next day, students arranged various feelings selfies of their classmates into BINGO or ¡Olé! boards.  When I said a feeling in Spanish, they had to find the corresponding picture and mark the space.  First to get a row of pictures horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, won that round of review.

When I reviewed with my Spanish 2 students at high school, I had them arrange their photos for homework so that we could skip that part during class the next day and get right into playing the review game.  This made our class time more efficient.

I have a to-do list that keeps on growing!

My to-do list seems to get longer each day.  I inevitably find another great idea to try on Edmodo professional groups or Pinterest boards.  I do my best to work on projects from start to finish, but there are so many things that catch my eye that I find it difficult to complete something to the point of using it!  I really enjoy seeing tangible results, hence my weaning interest in long projects and eventual pile of unfinished starts.

A goal of mine this year is to whittle away at my to-do list by prioritizing project ideas on the basis of use and impact.  One of my first accomplishments this month was creating three of these flower clocks (one for each classroom I teach in) as visual aids for telling time in Spanish.

I got this idea from blog Señora Baxter's Spanish Class.  Each flower petal goes with a five-minute increment on the clock and shows the addition and subtraction of telling time in Spanish.  I changed up the design a bit by making the petals in two different colors - one for adding minutes to the hour and the other for subtracting minutes from the hour.  I think my students will find this wall reference very useful as we learn/review the subject of telling time.  My other two classrooms have different petal colors.  I also made my own ¨clock¨ because the classroom clocks were in less visible places along the wall.