A Jamming Success! Teaching Holiday Traditions in a Time-crunched Spanish class!

Today was a jam session two days before Winter Break! We had a full house, and I hope they enjoyed the festivities. One of the things I love about Jamboard (a new collaborate feature from Google), is that I can assign student work, and monitor it at simultaneously. It’s like having communal work time. This collaborative feature is my version of the class “Flyover”, virtual style of course! As you can see from the picture below, students have to write their name and own their work. I love it! And you can add this to your repertoire of classroom activities and hacks!

To ensure everyone has a board or space to work, I normally create create two Jamboards per class:

Jamboard#1 contains last names A-M

Jamboard #2 contains last names N-Z

Each student stakes their claim to the JB, write their name (I usually include pronouns).

Día de las velitas

Today, we finally had an opportunity to finish our discussion about traditions (Día de las velitas) in Spanish-speaking countries ( Check out La noche de las velitas resource here). Due to surveys and EOY activities, we had only two class periods, so I decided to make the most of it. I showed a few videos, and we had a lively discussion. For my level 4 students, I invited them to do the following:

Watch the video below about Día de las velitas in Cartagena, and note their observations on Jamboard.
For the first two questions (on the JB above) they could respond to in English; this took some of the pressure off because they might not have had the vocabulary to express what they were seeing. Even with that I am happy to report many of them looked up the words anyway, and shared. Win-win. They had to respond to the last question in Spanish which as comparing their traditions to that of Día de las velitas.
Since Spanish was spoken at a relatively fast pace in the video below, I invited them to engage in more observing than anything. This is a perfect way to use authentic resources as there were so many attention-grabbing elements.

During the video, I stopped and explained a few things, one being the culture for Beauty Pageants in Colombia (See resource on first Afro-Colombian Beauty Queens in Colombia and Afro-Colombian Beauty Pageant business woman). I also pointed out one of the men filmed making wishes. At times, the music interferes.

I choose two other traditions and had them watch a shorter videos, explain what they saw, and engage in the activity listed below. You can make a copy of the Choice-board document below (make your own corrections as well:).