Back at it!

I know that I feel like this every year, but I can never believe how fast the summer flies by! Tomorrow we have an institute day and the following day will be my first day with my new students. Last year was my first year teaching middle school Spanish and there were so many times where I thought to myself "Oh no...I should have done this differently!" This year I'm excited to learn from my mistakes and make this year even better than the last. 

Last year I started class off with an Instagram photo booth for the first day (read more about last year's first day plans here), but this year I wanted to shake things up! For the first day of school I will show the students a power point introducing myself with pictures of my summer. While I am explaining the pictures the students will be playing "strip" bingo. I will write high-frequency words from my presentation on the whiteboard and students have to fill in each of the five squares on their bingo strip with a different word. When they hear me say a word that is on the end of their bingo strip they get to tear it off. Whoever tears off all of the words first is the winner. This is a great game because it helps the students stay engaged while they are listening. 

On the second day of school I will let the students pick a Spanish name and then we will play Speedball to help learn everyone's name and build our classroom community. I got this game from the 'Mis Clases Locas' blog which has some really great ideas for the beginning of the year. After playing speedball I am going to give my students a survey to fill out about their summer (you can download the 'vacaciones de verano' survey below.) Each student will walk around the room with a clipboard and paper and ask their classmates the questions on the survey. If a student answers 'yes' to one of the questions he/she signs the box containing the question. More advanced students can give a full response using the prompts at the bottom of the square. The object of the game is to get a different name in each square. Once the students are done filling in all of the squares we play bingo! To play bingo I randomly call out names and if a student has a square with the name that I call out they mark it with an 'X'. If someone gets a bingo they have to read the answers back to me. For example, "María fue a las montañas, Juan comió en un restaurante, etc."

vacaciones_de_verano.docx
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Last year I created my syllabus on Piktochart. This year I went onto their website and revised my syllabus to include more detailed course goals and information about homework and grading. I copied my course goals from the syllabus on the Creative Language Class blog and I copied the section about proficiency from a syllabus on a different blog that I can't find now (if you recognize where this section came from let me know--I'd love to cite the blog here.) You can download a copy of my 7th grade syllabus below (the 8th grade syllabus is the same except the novels are Bianca Nieves y los 7 toritos & La Llorona de Mazatlán.) 

7th_grade_syllabus_2017_18.pdf
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What are your favorite activities to use during the first weeks of class?