This is my plan to end our school year remotely taking advantage of having my students at home so that they can go over their clothes to play and learn at the same time.

My plan (Make it yours) I have done this activity in the classroom as part of planning our trips to Spanish-speaking countries and choosing what we would wear. Since we are at home, I thought my students would like to show off their Home Style.

These are just some ideas of what I want to do with my new TPT product that comes in Seesaw, PearDeck, and Google Slide versions.

1. Introduce the activity: Use the PearDeck Presentation to teach the lesson. I love the interactivity it promotes among my students. Have your students join the presentation and show the title on the first slide . Then, explain that they will participate in a Fashion Show called “En Casa con Estilo” – “At Home with Style”. They will learn how to describe the outfit they would like to wear making sure they select five or more items from the vocabulary you will present. We do not have much time for accessories but I would encourage my students to share other items at the end of the class if time permits.

2. Clothing Scavenger Hunt: This is how our students will learn the vocabulary. Divide your class into two or three groups. Tell your students you will tell them to bring one of the items you will display on your screen. Once they bring the item, they need to type the item and its color into the interactive slide. They are organized in a way students can find the patterns that make all words “match”. Not all the students need to type the same or look for the items, they can divide and conquer: one student can bring the item while another student types. Read their answers as you point to the items and the colors in your screen.

1. Matching: Students need to type in the drawing slide the number for each one of  the items we presented. This could be an opportunity for teams to interact over Zoom chat or breakout rooms. I apologize I do not have much experience using another platform.

2. Stop!: Students are to use the drawing slide to type the proper form of the colors to match the items on the top. The first one to finish has to shout out “¡PAREN!” and you need to block responses at that time. Then, display the responses and make sure nobody starts working on the next row. Students can go back to check on the previous slides to complete this part but it would take their team more time to finish. This can encourage more attention to the patterns.

3. Independent work: Assign your students to complete the Deck independently. I set up the activity on Seesaw which is the platform my students are more familiar with and I would assign them to work on it, instead. If you use Google Classroom, you can share the Google Slide Presentation. The last section is for your students to choose an outfit to wear, wear it, and get a picture taken. They need to upload and label the picture. Then, they need to record themselves reading the description. That would be preparation for our next lesson which would be our Fashion Show rehearsal.

4. Rehearsal: Ask your students for ideas on the set up. We need to think of what music we will be using, who is controlling the sound, what order they would model, when to read/describe their outfits. I am planning to use the Spotlight option of Zoom.

7. Fashion Show: If you dare, ask your students to invite their parents to 

watch the fashion show or post the video in their platform for them   to watch it later.

I would love to hear from your experience using this product. Please remember to subscribe to my blog for notifications on my new posts and products.

These are some of the Comprehensible Input activities my fifth grade curriculum is centered around, and which I had to adapt to remote teaching. This is my third week meeting my classes Live once a week and I spent two weeks preparing videos and activities for my students to work independently. In those two weeks, I prepared stories and news for my kids to work on while we could meet again and share what we knew and learned about the students who were still waiting to be “la Persona Especial”.

My fifth grade classes are a little larger this year and I was/am facing the risk of not having enough time to treat everybody as especially as the first students we talked, interviewed, and wrote stories about. I know I cannot recreate the same experience under these circumstances and I was doubting I could do it in the classroom, anyway. Our class stories took different turns and other school activities replaced my class time, and you know the rest.

When our Lower School Head asked me how often I wanted to see my classes, I knew that I needed to split them into half so that we could interact better. I used to see my fifth grade classes twice a week for forty minutes and I kept the same time but have been seeing half of one class on one day and the rest the next day. The day I don’t see them, they are assigned independent work. The opportunity to just see them has been fantastic since our interactions have been more dynamic but it has also been a little tiring for me. If we are going back to remote teaching in the fall, I would need to reconsider this arrangement.

To be honest, my first Live lessons were a cry to bring our past class routine to life. It seemed to work but time was running and we have a month to go and also many stories to create. Then, I met Pear Deck and I love how convenient it was to collect the information I needed in a faster yet effective way.

In this Deck I am sharing, the first slide if for the Cards my students designed with their interests. Their classmates and themselves are given two minutes to write as much as they can using the card as a reference or anything they know about our “Special Person”. In the classroom, I would just talk about one person at the time, and interview our Persona Especial about what their classmates described.

Since I have many students to be our Special Person, I created a slide for each one of them and assigned experts to write about one “Persona Especial” at the time. I had four Special Persons and each student got to be an expert, even the Special Persons were experts about another Special Person. When the two minutes were up, I shared their responses projecting them in my screen. I read them through and interviewed each Special Person about the information we collected.

The next slides are statements about our “Personas Especiales” and my students got to drag an icon to express their view. That looked a little messy when I projected in my screen and I could not figure out what dots belonged to each person. However, the statements were really useful to introduce input and just verify if our guesses were correct or not by interviewing each Persona Especial at the time. Having the statements ready on my screen were important visual support and encouraged everyone’s participation.

Right after the statements come the story slides. For this part, I referred to one Special Person at the time asking where, with whom, and what problem they might have in their stories. I asked the experts for their opinion before I asked the rest of the class for other ideas. Our Special Person got to decide what idea they liked the best.

We did not have time to move to the solution. I assigned it as homework. We moved right to the last slide which is Write and Discuss with my twist – I learned about this strategy from the book The Natural Approach to the Year by Tina Hargaden and Ben Slavic. Students shared what they learned about our Special Persons by typing their answers to my oral questions. In my classroom, I typed what my students told me they had learned about our Special Person. In my remote platform, I found it useful to ask my class questions related to what we talked about and had them answer. With that information, I put together all their ideas and upload each description as separate Seesaw activities. Experts need to record themselves reading their Special Person’s description. I am trying to collect videos in Spanish related to the activities our Special Person likes for some extra input and for some I am using Edpuzzle.

Our next class will be about finishing up our stories and typing a solution to the problems and all the steps are in the same Deck. I hope you can find it useful and would love to hear your experience with it if you give it a try. This is my first attempt to reach many students in this platform and I might need to make more tweaks. What would you keep/change/add? Please subscribe to my blog to receive notifications about my new posts and send me an email if you have any questions.

Our Jr.K teachers asked me if I wanted to connect to their upcoming Shark unit or if I wanted to review shapes, and I found the perfect source of inspiration to combine both. Check out this cool and cute video!

This is how this new Seesaw activity came to life:

Hope you can use it and if you do, please let me know how you like it!

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Today was my second day running a Scavenger Hunt with my fourth graders using Zoom, Seesaw, and Pear Deck and it was really FUN!!!

We had been talking and comparing schedules to schools in the Spanish-speaking countries and before going on our Spring Break we had scheduled to have a Scavenger Hunt around our school. Since things did not work out because many students traveled or were sick, I had to make it happen in a new format under our remote learning platform.

In our regular Scavenger Hunt, students were grouped into teams, assigned a chaperone, and given one iPad and a handout with the clues. They had to solve all the clues taking pictures and uploading them into Seesaw within 30 minutes. There was a lot of running and teamwork involved and the chaperones could not keep up with their teams sometimes. Not even our P.E. teacher volunteer. Before leaving my classroom, I would give groups an iPad with the timer set up for thirty minutes to solve ten clues.

For our virtual Scavenger Hunt, I doubled the clues, keep the same time, and invited chaperones to accompany each group in their breakout rooms. The handout with clues was replaced by a Deck with fifteen questions, and 5 photos to upload in Seesaw. When my students joined me, I explained how they were grouped, who their chaperone was going to be, and how to access the Deck. Yesterday, I told my class to type joinpd.com in their browser, and then the code. Today, I posted the link and the password in a Seesaw message under their Student Journal and it seemed to work better.

Assigning students into their breakout rooms was very easy and having the chance to move across rooms and answer questions was very convenient. I loved how I could broadcast a message in Zoom announcing how much time they had left, and checking how far they were on their decks in the Pear Deck dashboard.

It was truly an amazing experience for me and my students and their chaperones seemed to like it, too.

I contributed this deck to the Pear Deck community and hope you can use it and have fun with your classes!

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I started using PearDeck last week and I am loving it! I would like to share one of the decks I created for our unit on “Mi plato nutritivo” with you : ¿El taco es nutritivo?. I found new ways to interact with my students and a cool video about putting together a taco recipe that I will be using for a simulation at a Taquería. Hope you like it! Here is the link:

I wanted to share some Seesaw activities I created to provide my preschool students and their parents with different sources of input. My students and I love the episodes from Salsa by the GPB, and I assigned an episode related to Spring. To introduce the activity, I used MovieTalk, and then students added a response on Seesaw telling me what they had understood, their favorite parts of the story or their favorite character. It was so exciting to seeing how they used vocabulary in Spanish in their narrations and I think it was an activity their parents appreciated.

My students are using Epic Books with their homeroom teachers and one of the parents asked me if I could recommend books for her child to listen to in Spanish. I had used Epic Books in the classroom but it did not occur to me to assign a book until now because my students did not use to get any homework in pre-school. There are very interesting titles and I was lucky to find one to review expressions that we use often in class and included Sign Language. Although this book is not one from the “Read to me” collection, I am loving to see my kindergarteners’ videos being my Sign Language teachers while reviewing our Spanish class’ expressions and phrases.

In Epic Books, I also found two titles that related to my unit on life cycles and the Seesaw activity and poem “La Oruguita Pequeñita”. The response of my Jr. Kindergarteners has been really great.

My pre-schoolers have also enjoyed recording videos and posting them on Seesaw selecting, singing, and dancing to the songs we have learned and that are available in our Webmixes.

I hope you are enjoying your remote teaching as much as it is possible under this circumstances and that my activities and ideas help you somehow lessen your work load. If they are, please subscribe to my blog to receive notifications on my new posts.

We have been teaching remotely for two weeks already and I have not seen any of my classes Live yet. I have been communicating with my students and their families through Seesaw and I have been creating videos of me demonstrating how to do the activities or just running the routines my kids were used to. Many of my older students have been completing their assignments or have been asking me questions but I have not heard from many yet especially many of the younger ones.

When I see the posts from my Pre-K, Jr. K and Kindergarten classes, I cannot feel any other thing than gratitude. I acknowledge the time and the effort the parents are putting into completing the activities and I wish they could tell me if they are finding them too much to handle or how I could help them better to carry on their children’s Spanish learning at home.

I am alternating a Seesaw activity and a video with our routines. Last week, I created for the first time a video of me teaching online and it was the most difficult thing I have done so far. I really hope it gets easier. If you knew me just a little, you would know one thing about me and that is that I do not like to be on a video. This is how far I have come for my students and when I am recording the videos I just think I am doing them for them.

So my first video was for my Pre-kindergarteners and it was about the farm. I love songs and especially those that can easily be adapted into a game and I used the song “La Vaca Lola” by ToyCantando as my main source of input.

Explaining the game I would play in the classroom was a little tough and I hope the parents had given it a try. In the classroom, we start by making a line that I lead, we listen to the song and sing along, and when we hear/say the sound “muuu”, we turned around. That way, I would be the last person in the line, and the “caboose” would be the leader. I had to explain it using a picture of a cow and I still do not know how it went for the parents who decided to do it. I hope they had fun.

This is the week I assign a Seesaw activity and I wanted to focus on another farm animal. This activity mixes new vocabulary with topics my kids were familiar with. I put together a video demonstrating how to do the activities in Spanish and added questions I would ask while describing an animal. My goal is for the parents to play the video for my kids to watch and listen to me providing them with input that is still comprehensible despite the circumstances.

Here is the link to the activity for you to add it to your Seesaw library before it is available in the community area. Seesaw has been receiving lots of contributions and many of mine are not showing in the community section yet.

Please let me know if you try this activity and how it works for you and your students. Subscribe to receive notifications of my future posts.

Check out how I created this activity on this video

This is my new Seesaw activity about the farm that I just created for my Pre-Kindergarteners. My goal is for them to have some practice on the vocabulary about animals from the stories and songs we will be learning in class as they trace, color, drag, and count. The first page has a video of me modeling how to do the activity for my students. Click on the image below to add the activity into your Seesaw library. I contributed it already but I am not sure when it would be available under the listings.

You can also print this activity here