SAMPLE ACTIVITIES

In order to promote interactive teaching and learning experiences in my practice, I try to create activities that are linked to students’ interests, their digital skills; and that are strongly aligned to the curriculum content.  Below, I am going to present a variety of class activities that have been designed taking into consideration these three precepts and that aim to help learners to acquire academic and cultural content in a constructive and dynamic way. 

​Actividad 1: Repaso de las formas del pasado (UN2101)

​Everyday, my class begins with a short activity that aims to either review, present new vocabulary/topics or correct the homework. This is an activation activity that prepares students mindset to start learning Spanish.  The activity that I present below was completed in UN2101 class during the first 10 minutes of class time. 
The goal of the activity is to review the use of the different past tenses and to try to guess who wrote each answer. Therefore, it has four main goals:
1. Instructional: to review past tenses
2. To build a better class environment and group relationships: by playing to try to guess who answered each question. 
3. To work written interaction
4. To work oral interaction
Once all students answered the questions, and we tried to guess who responded each question, learners will be organized in pairs and will have to review the answers on the board and check if there are any mistakes. If they find an error, they will write a comment on the post it. This activity promotes self-assessment and peer-assessment, as well as learning in a conscious and active way. Hopefully, at the end of this task, students will understand better how to use the different verb forms to express past tense

CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO ACCESS THE ACTIVITY

Actividad 3: Resumen “El examen”
​ (UN2102-Unit 1)

El Examen is a literary text that students find really difficult, to help them understand better the meaning of this complex text, I invite them to write in groups a summary of the different paragraphs of the text in a digital panel create it with Lino.it, a digital tool to create interactive boards. Once they finish posting, we can all read what each group wrote and the summaries of each section.
The reason behind using a digital panel is mainly that they can receive instant feedback regarding their writing skills (I can review their work and correct what they write at the same time). On top of that, it promotes constructive and collaborative learning because students can, also, correct their peers. Finally, by asking each group to summarize their part, all class members will be able to understand better the literary text by reading what each group wrote. To access to this activity, please, click on picture 1. 

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Activity 5: El Norte (UN2102-Unit 2)

Students will work in small groups to analyze the movie El Norte following the instructions described in our virtual learning space. To assure that this task is completed in a collaborative way, I created a Linoit board where students will present their analysis of part 1, 2 and 3. This digital board promotes peer assessing because students can review the work presented by other classmates and, in a constructive way, they can correct their texts. On top of that, this board is very useful because it is located online, so students can use it, whenever they wish, to review for the exams, for example.

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Activity 2: Introducción al concepto de Comunidad (UN2102)

To help students familiarize to the new topic of Unit 1, and to activate the learning, I propose students, as warm up activity, to create a word cloud about the concept of “comunidad” using Mentimeter (an interactive tool that allows students to answer using their mobile devices and publishes their responses anonymously and instantly).

​Each student is asked to write five words that come to their mind when they think about the word “community”. In less than five to seven minutes, results appear on the screen and the class has altogether created a word cloud round the term. After this activation activity, students are organized in groups and they to come up with a Spanish definition of this concept, taking in to consideration their personal experiences and the words that in the word cloud. 


 Activity 4: Problemas contemporáneos 
(UN2102-Unit2)

​To finish the analysis of the topic related to current problems (Unit 2, 2102), we will listen the song “Hijos de un mismo Dios”(Macaco). This song talks about five different contexts and the problems associated to each setting. Once students complete the missing words, they will, in groups, talk about the different issues and they will have to add a new strophe.
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​Activity 6: Repaso “por y para” (UN2102)

To help students review the use of the prepositions “por y para” I bring this Kahoot activity to the class. We had been working on these prepositions in the previous classes, so this was a warm up activity that it was done at the beginning of the class, with two main objectives: to review and motivate students to continue learning.  Students find very difficult to understand when to use “por” or “para”, so short activities like this help them settle down knowledge and clarify their doubts. Click the image to access the Kahoot!


CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO ACCESS THE ACTIVITY

Activity 7: Vocabulary Unit 3 (UN2102-Unit 3)

Learning vocabulary is a difficult task, usually students tend to write long lists of words with their meaning and try to memorize them. In this activity, students have to complete the sentences using vocabulary from Unit 3. In order to help them in the process of acquiring vocabulary, I created a set of three activities, using H5P, that aim to consolidate the learning of lexical structures. To access these activities, click in the picture and scroll down to find the activities under the vocabulary list.
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​Activity 8. Describing Pan´s Labyrinth characters (UN2102-Unit 4)

Students work in groups to describe, with detail, the main characters of the movie Pan´s Labyrinth. They are asked to use as many as possible grammar structures learnt during Unit 4, as well as the vocabulary presented in the unit. To complete this activity students will use Padlet, a digital tool to create online boards, where you can post multimodal texts (picture, audio, video, text).  This board also promotes an optimal class environment because students, after reading their classmates work, can like it by clicking the “heart” sign, also, they can make comments to the work that is published. 
By clicking in the images, you will access to two different panels. 

Hecho con Padlet

Hecho con Padlet

Activity 9: Set of activities to consolidate vocabulary from Unit 4 (UN2102)
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As it was mentioned previously, learning vocabulary is a difficult task, so I created a set of 4 activities to help students acquire the new concepts presented in Unit 4.