After spending 10 years in our Portable Sweet Portable, the Spanish department is back in the building! If there’s one good thing about declining enrollment, it’s this!
Our biggest initial concern about the impending move was that we’re not great neighbors. We teach LOUD! We sing! We dance! We play games that would certainly alarm any non-language teachers. Thankfully our principal knows us well, and has accepted this as part of our charm. He located us at the very end of the hallway, across from the kitchen. We can teach as loud as we want, and we can only hear each other. How’s that for a supportive administration!? We are very blessed.
I’ve been teaching in my new room since school started in mid August. It’s taken me a few weeks to iron out the kinks, figure out the flow and hang the last couple of posters. I’m so excited to share it with you! Come take a peek:
I wasn’t able to capture all the goodness in the video, so here are a few close up and details:
I love this wall. It looks like a bulletin board, but really it’s Better than Paper stapled the the wall, because the janitor told me the existing bulletin boards COULD.NOT.BE.MOVED.NO.MATTER.WHAT. We’re making lemonade out of lemons, people!
This post explains the idea, but in a nutshell, these are the things I encourage students to say to each other throughout class: when they move to work with a partner, when we’re playing a game, after the game, etc. I don’t like to start the year will loads of expressions, I introduce them poco a poco because I think that helps them actually use them and internalize them. Once they automatically greet their partner with “Qué gusto verte”, it’s time to add a new one.
Did you catch the verb endings, above the whiteboards and screen? Here are the links (they’re free!) Present and Past and explanation of how I use them.
I’ve got a pretty sweet library and here’s a Books in Señora Chase’s Library, organized by level, in case you’re looking to add some new additions to your library. And if you’re curious, here are more details about how we do Free Reading over at The Chase Place.
Isn’t it funny that kids need to go to the bathroom when you’re boring, but no one has to go potty when you’re playing Mafia or Hatchi Patchi?! (Shameless plug: I just wrote a book about classroom games and you can read more about Mafia and Hatchi Patchi and 48 other games in Proficiency through Play, available now!) A few years ago a implemented a new bathroom policy that I love, that is doing a good job of limiting missed instruction.
I’ve got a bathroom board at the back of the room, right next to the hallway door. When the Little Darlings need to take care of business, they write their name on the board, then return to their seats. Since the board is in my line of sight as I’m teaching, it’s easy to keep an eye on the list and to signal the waiting student when it’s a good time to run to the bathroom. I don’t let them go when we’re reading, or during an input chunk, like a Clip Chat or Story Asking, but when we transition to a new activity, or during a game or brain break, the bathroom revolving door is open, and they go in the order on the board.
And the funny thing is, often when we’re playing a game and I send a waiting Little Darling to the baño, he tells me he’s good, he will stay in class to play the game. 😂 And…I think it helps kids to go to the bathroom and return quickly, knowing that there are other students waiting for them to return. (And don’t you worry, if there is an emergency or an accommodation, of course they can go to the bathroom without waiting!)
At the front of the room our Spinner Wheel of Prizes. (Here are more details about the Wheel of Prizes- so much fun!) and displayed at the back of the room is the Menu of Aplausos Especiales, also lots of fun!
I haven’t introduced Español in the Wild yet this year, but I will soon! It’s where students celebrate that they’ve used Spanish in real life, outside our classroom. When students report they ordered in Spanish at a restaurant or helped someone at work or introduced themselves to a new Spanish speaking student…they grab a post it note and add it to the display. Here’s this year’s (soon to be in use) display area; the basket on top of the cabinet is full of post it notes and pens. Check out some of last year’s precious post-its:
Lastly, here’s our “Word Wall”, it’s organized into “Palabras esenciales”, “Palabras prácticas” and “Palabras divertidas”, inspired by Justin Slocum Bailey’s German Class I took in Flordia years ago.
We started out the year with 3 blank papers stuck on the whiteboard, and as useful words come up, I add them to their respective papers. The “Palabras esenciales” are Spanish 2’s vocabulary words. Those are the high frequency verbs that we gesture, use in PQA, and in our Story Askings/Clip Chats. Those words stay up for the whole unit, and then are removed for the Celebration of Knowledge. The “Palabras prácticas” and “Palabras divertidas” will stay up all year. When we use a word that’s already on the wall, I Pause and Point at it. Once the pages get filled up, I will move the “Palabras prácticas” and “Palabras divertidad” to another spot in the classroom. The will be available for students who are looking for a word, but for most Little Darlings, they won’t need the support any more.
Lastly, I’m loving having a hallway again and am using it as an extension of my classroom. So far we’ve done a Gallery Walk, Question Trail, Running Dictation and a Crossword Running Dictation. So far, not a single lunch lady has complained 🙂 And look at these beautiful bulletin boards (and super fun Mexican inspired bulletin board boarders here and here)
In Heritage we’ve been talking about identity and names. We’ve read the excerpt “Mi nombre” from La casa en mango street and “Alma y cómo obtuvo su nombre“. We’ve learned about Major League Baseball’s Ponle acento campaign and then they picked adjectives to describe themselves to combine with their names, using exactly one zillion scrabble tiles. I love how they turned out!!! (and don’t look too closely…try as we might, a few spelling mistakes snuck in!)
I want the other board to be interactive, so for our first installment, I put up some enlarged coloring pages and pinned some pouches with colored pencils up. My department was taking bets for how long it would take for naughty drawings to appear, but so far, so good! I love that every day, a little bit more has been colored in.
And of course, since the 3 Spanish classrooms are all in a row, I decorated our end of the hall with Papel Picado for a little something extra. How could I not?! We’re very happy in our new classrooms! Thanks for coming along on the tour!
