Today was the first day back from Spring Break (which was awesome, thanks for asking!) and so of course we chatted about their vacations in slow, comprehensible Spanish. There are a zillion ways to do Weekend Chat (which can be modified for Spring Break Chat or Labor Day Weekend Chat or whatever) but today I tried something new that went great and I’m still excited about it, so what else would I do late on a Monday afternoon than write a blog post about it!?!

I created a Google Form with different possible Spring Break activities on it, using the “check box” question option. I grouped different activities together with the same verb (to get lots of repetitions of “fuiste” or “comiste”…I’m sneaky like that!) and for their warm-up, students came in and completed the Spring Break Survey, which looked like this:

Since I used the “Check box” option, students could select all the things they did over break, and then they submitted their “answers”.   I projected the responses on the board for all to see. If you’re new to Google Forms, open the form to edit, then click on “responses”  at the top of the page:

The Amazing Google People will give you a beautiful graph of your student responses; let the chit chat begin! If you don’t see your graphs right away, make sure you click “Summary” at the top. 

(And before I get any envious emails about my class of 21 students… really I have 31 in this class… 10 of them were evidently having such a great time on Spring Break that they didn’t come to school today!)

Once you project the graphs, there’s so much you can talk about with  great visuals!! Just remember, keep it slow and comprehensible. Some possibilities:

• Who watched a movie in the theater? Which one? Did you like it? 
• How many students watched Netflix? How many students went to the movies? Did more watch Netflix or Movies? Do you prefer to watch a movie at the theater or at home?
• What percentage of students did homework over break? Who had homework but didn’t do it?! (Feign horror: You didn’t do your homework?!?!?!!!Are you serious, you had homework and you didn’t do it?!)

It worked great because it was new, we’d never done it before. I loved it that they read first then we talked about it AND we had a good reason to practice numbers, in a natural way.

If you’re dying of jealousy because of my classroom skylights, they’re not really skylights but they totally look like it! I bought these sweet (but unfortunately a bit pricey!)  Cloud Light Covers from Amazon and you can too! (And if you do, I’ll get like .05 cents from the nice folks at Amazon, just FYI!)

A tip: If you  want to try it, be sure to make a copy for EACH class, (rather than giving the same survey to multiple sections) so that you can talk about THEIR results, and not all the Spanish 1 results.

If you want to see the survey as students see it, here it is!

Let the final count down begin…we’ve got 6 weeks left to go! What about you?!