A story we are currently working on is El muchacho frustrado. For El muchacho frustrado, I took the storyline from Sr. Wooly's song Pan and included core verbs and vocabulary the students need to know for Spanish II at the high school and then added some addtional fun language. I almost always pair a noun and an adjective together to get a vocabulary chunk rather than having them separate. This has really helped with teaching noun adjective agreement. I have also started leaving off the article or possessive pronoun to have students have to figure them out with me to help them remember them better. I also try and include a time expression regularly to reinforce it and build background details and I also generally include a couple expressions to help add voice to the story. I began this unit with students becoming familiar with vocabulary on the list (I purposely always put previously studied vocab on the list for reinforcement, so while the list may look long, students have seen a lot of it before) with a discussion of the vocabulary and ideas on how to make connections to the words to help remember them. For example: trae= to bring. Two ideas we discussed were: bring the tray and "try" to bring _____ to the party because it's delicious. I like to take the time to have students look closely at the words for nuances and to make those connections. I still remember connections like that for particular words my teacher did that with in high school many years later.
As the hook for the lesson I used the Pan video and began the unit with a MovieTalk. The students loved it and were highly engaged due to the awesomeness of the video and the discussion we had. We only discussed the introduction before the song began and that worked perfectly as that was about the point we needed to change gears. By the time we were done students had created a sub-plot to the story making predictions and suppositions about what had gone on. I was also able to get lots of repetitions of the target vocabulary and it really just felt like we were having fun discussing a video. I knew the lesson was a hit when a student came to my afternoon class and it was evident he had been talking to someone from the morning class about the video already by the vocabulary he was asking to know and things he wanted to add to the story. Humor and fun right after the winter break, including a 3 King's Day presentation and celebration made for a great start to the new year.
I also included some information on bakeries and bread this year to add in some cultural discussion and share personal experiences with panaderías from living abroad and travel.
I am including some resources for teaching the story below. Sr. Wooly has given me permission to use the images from the video and share my version of the story. If you would like to access the Pan video, you will need to subscribe to his website. If you haven't visited his site lately, Sr. Wooly now also has some new interactive practice activities available to help reinforce the song vocabulary as well, adding some nice variety to assignments students can do!
El muchacho frustrado- Presentation
Quizlet set
Vocab list and grammar notes and practice
Textivate- story ordering