Thanksgiving

It is finally Thanksgiving week! The students are excited about spending time with their families for this holiday, so I decided to embrace their excitement and do a fun mini-story about Thanksgiving. I found the book El Pavo de Acción de Gracias by Cassie Williams on Amazon. I love instant gratification, so I downloaded the book onto my iPad for only $2.99 and it immediately showed up on my Kindle app (you can download this app for free in the iTunes store, all you need is an Amazon account to purchase books). 

This book was a great find because, in addition to recycling high frequency vocabulary like quieres and te gusta, it is very entertaining. There are so many wonderful Spanish children's books, but often the language is too complex for my students to comprehend and I end up rewriting the story. This book was a great find because it was already written at the level of my students.  

Lesson: I started out my lesson by talking about what my students eat during Thanksgiving. I put of pictures of different Thanksgiving foods and asked them questions (all in the target language of course).

• Do you eat pumpkin pie?
  
• Do you like stuffing?
  
• Does your brother want gravy?
  

The possibilities are endless here. You can change the types of questions you ask to recycle different words and elicit higher order thinking. If their answer to the question was yes then they had to stand up and I would do some PQA (personalized questions and answers) to get more information and repetitions of my key vocabulary structures. The last picture that I showed them was of a turkey. I asked my class if turkeys like Thanksgiving, to which I received a resounding "No".
I then picked a few actors for my story. I had all of the actors sitting at a table with plates in front of them. My students had been working with pone (puts) so I had the actor playing the roll of the mom put different foods on each person's plate to get some more repetitions of this high frequency structure. Once everyone had food on their plates I told them to start eating and the dad put his knife in the turkey. Just before the knife went into the turkey the actor that was playing the turkey screamed. The turkey stood up and said "Espera" (wait). I then read the book where the turkey is trying to convince the family to eat other foods instead of him.    


Extensions: 

• Do a whiteboard 30 second draw where the teacher orally retells parts of the story or book and one student comes to the board and has 30 seconds to draw it. Have the students draw the pictures in different spaces on the board and then have students order the pictures chronologically by having them write # 1 on the first picture, #2 on the second, etc.    
• Give students red and green strips of paper and ask comprehension questions about the story the class acted out and/or the book. If what you say is true then they hold up the green card and if it is false they hold up the red card. Have students close their eyes and memorize which card is in which hand so they are not tempted to just copy what other students are holding up.
• After reading the book give students 30 seconds to come up with an alternate ending in Spanish. Have each pair share their ending while you type them so they show up on your projector. Then have students vote on the best/most creative ending. You could even act out the ending that they vote on.