Inside:  Activities and plans for teaching Episode 4 of Tierra Incógnita from Disney+.

Hola and welcome back to another chat about teaching the show Tierra Incógnita. In this blog I'm talking about Episode 4.  If you haven't  already I recommend going back and joining me on the journey with pre-teaching and Episode 1, Episode 2, and Episode 3, so you can see the whole scope and sequence.

As always, we start by watching the Episode. Episode 4 is a fun one with lots of new information revealed.   It's also pretty easy to follow what's happening for my Spanish 3 students , so I really wanted to lean into letting them have the opportunity to really focus on what was going on, but still wanted to accountability piece of a viewing activity as well as  a way to collect data that they were comprehending what they watched quickly and effectively.

Students watched the episode and completed a Glyph comprehension worksheets. Glpyh worksheets are a great tool in the world language classroom.  Here is a great blog by The Comprehensible Classroom that lays out all the awesomeness of using them in your classroom to access and get in  repetitions of structures.
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I like using this as a way to make multiple choice a little more engaging and as a way for students to get in exposure and repetitions of question structures. Students  watched the episode and there were 10 questions to answer that went chronologically with the episode. They read the comprehension questions and then read potential answers to them.  Each answer had a corresponding color attached to it (yay for sneaky receptions of colors), they then used their answers to figure out what color corresponded with what number -- if they were correct aka comprehended the show and questions accurately then their coloring pages would be colored in correctly. So for example , if for question one their answer they chose had (amarillo) after it then they should color all the ones on the coloring  by number aka glyph yellow to represent their answer. Bonus: sometimes even teenagers need an excuse to color! 

The next Monday we did not do a ClipChat for the first time since starting the show. Instead we reviewed what had  happened so far and practiced for a listening assessment. We played Resentimiento which you can learn more about and how to play at my  blog here, but it is always a huge hit . I also assigned  this Gimkit HW that my lovely coworkers helped co-create (Hola, Lili  and Grace if you're reading this -- you guys are literally the absolute best!).

The listening assessment was structured to follow our grading  scales using proficiency based performance scales. We read out sentences describing characters in the show students should be familiar with -- we started out with simple statements like "Esta persona es sobreprotectora y  estricta. " (Santiago) that were more obvious and our higher level sentences were more about things characters did and required understanding more of the details like -- "Esta persona entró en el parque abandonado con sus amigos y fue atacado en las cavernas por su primo." (Agustín). We did 3 at each level of our proficiency scale and in my resources I laid out more  examples of how we went about accessing for proficiency. Overall, it was a difficult assessment for some, but many students also excelled - -and this is most likely not shocking  to any of my fellow teachers out there -- the ones that practiced with the Gimkit and consistently completed viewing guides and  participated in class ClipChats Ep1-4   were in the upper percentage. You could potentially decrease the difficulty by making it so no characters are repeated, but we liked that students had to demonstrate truly knowing who we were describing, by making it, so that ANY character could be the answer for ANY question.

There's a bonus activity in this episode's resources -- part because I didn't inlcude ClipChat screenshots  slides, which are some of my favorite and also the most time consuming parts of these episode lesson plans, but mostly because one year ago I was teaching in a school that required we use an incredibly outdated approach -- not even a textbook but lists of  verbs and vocab determined by a teacher years ago and I was required to teach vocabulary surrounding "dar consejos", so I was doing everything I could to incorporate those structures and vocabulary into engaging activities. From this was born a bonus set of posters called "Dar consejos". I had students simply complete a gallery walk, rotating around the room, and write advice for each character based on the scenario the character gave and they we had some people share out their advice. You could also give them to small groups and have each group share their ideas with the class. Either way, it's not a bad set of vocab or structures to learn in  an engaging context students find it entertaining to give advice to characters we all know. I wanted to add it to this  in case there was even one teacher like me a year ago that this would help.

So if you are interested in grabbing my ready made viewing guides (a novice and intermediate version of the questions), Resentimiento review game questions, dar consejos character gallery walk posters and  3 versions of a listening assessment you can grab them ALL   HERE.

Inside: Activities and my plans for teaching Episode 3 of the Disney+ show Tierra Incógnita.

Hola and welcome back to another chat about teaching the show Tierra Incógnita. In this blog I'm talking about Episode 3.  If you haven't read my blogs about Pre-teaching, Episode 1, or Episode 2 I recommend starting there to get a feel for how long my classes are, student abilities , and my planning patterns.

As always we start by simply watching Episode 3 as a class. I do this in one class period and I play the show with Spanish subtitles. Students know that we will  review the episode in more comprehensible Spanish and that I'll help clarify next episode -- their goal is to 1)enjoy and take in what they can and 2) complete their viewing guide.

The viewing activity for this episode  had students read a series of sentences in level appropriate Spanish, but it would periodically come to a spot where they  had to make a choice between two words to accurately complete the sentence based on what we had seen. I chose the words pretty strategically, so that even if the correct word was a new or unknown word for my students they should confidently know they other word so that they could accurately assume the unknown word  was correct and hopefully  acquire that word from context.

For example: 

Carmen le muestra (shows) a Eric (una caja/un libro) llena (full) de cosas de su mamá.

- Libro is a known word for my students, but caja is not. However, if they are watching the show it is pretty easy to see that  Eric's aunt does NOT hand him a book, but a box and thus students can interpret the unknown word from context visually and hopefully acquire that caja means box as we move forward. I also like this activity, because the sentences are in order of what we are watching , so lower students can use it as an aid as they watch to understand what is happening.
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After viewing activities:

The next class period we spent the class reviewing and comprehending what we had seen. We did a clip chat of the episode in comprehensible Spanish, checked their answers from their viewing guide, and then played a game of 2 truths and 1 lie. 

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Students write two true things that happened in this week's episode and 1 lie in Spanish and then  I collected them and read them out loud having students say 1, 2, ,3 as the one they thought was the lie -- I collect and read them so I can edit  and make their writing more comprehensible -- they got writing practice and listening practice all from the one activity and had fun trying to trick their peers.

If you are interested in grabbing my ready made viewing guide (plus a bonus 'advanced' version of the viewing activity), clip chat slides, and student hand outs for 2 truths and 1 lie you can grab them HERE.