Pre-reading
Before beginning I really wanted to make some connections to Social Studies and to create the real context in which the novel was set come to life more for students. I came across a CI reading here that Jeremy Jordan let me know was written by his colleague Joe Sallen. I wanted to build background knowledge before beginning the novel so I slightly modified his original text and added images to it in this presentation. I then pulled out some key structures and created other activities. I broke the presentation up over a series of 3 class periods and had students complete some independent reading of the text as well. This is one example of a reading they did. I found this map to be a good one for reinforcing geography as well as we discussed the information in the presentation. After students completed 2/3 of the reading activities, we played the beloved Kahoot. We didn't end up with time to use the Akinator in Spanish. It asks you questions to guess the name of a famous person. I wanted to try and have it guess Franciso Franco's identity based on what students had learned. We'll give it a try tomorrow!
Also, before getting into the novel, we listened to the famous Guapo, by Sr. Wooly (Youtube preview version here. (If you teach middle school, his website is a must!) The song is catchy and it helps kids easily remember lots of key vocabulary for describing in 1st and 3rd persons. I try and play at least 1 song during a class period as it helps add variety.
Organization
There are so many resources to organize once Elena and I start creating that we always use a Google Doc for resources and start linking videos, documents, presentations, etc. from it. This was an amazing idea on her part and has been a great time saver.
To be continued...