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.