Structuring LIVE, Synchronous Online Spanish Lessons

Hola all! It's been awhile since I've shared on my blog. Like many of you all, I spent the last 4 months of the 2019-2020 school year as an online Spanish teacher. While we'd all prefer a "normal" back to school this year, chances are we may be thrown into the requirement to give live, synchronous classes to our students at some point this school year. I wanted to give a quick overview of how I structure my 45-60 min Middle and High School online Spanish classes in hopes that you may be able to pick up a tip or two to help you out this school year! For context, my school used Google Meet™, but the same structure should work across various live platforms. Online Spanish classes definitely don't come naturally to most of us, but I found that implementing a routine made it easier on my students (and myself!) in the middle of a difficult time. Here's an overview of what you may typically see in my live online Spanish lessons. :)

• Start with a Para Empezar. Just like in the regular classroom, I always began with a warm up question that was projected when students entered the session. In our live sessions, my warm up question was always something that students were required to answer orally and rather quickly. I started at random points each session on my class roll and also used this question as an attendance tracker. This allowed me to hear every student speak right at the beginning of class and forced immediate engagement in Spanish. ;) 
• Review the Plan del Día. Next, we ran through an overview Slide of our session together so that students would know the topics and what to expect.
  
• Review Asynchronous Assignment. We alternated between synchronous and asynchronous days, so in our live sessions I would make sure to answer questions and do a quick review of what students had completed independently. 
  
• Cover New Concepts. In this part of the lesson I would introduce new material. This may be a presentation using Pear Deck, a reading together with discussion or watching video together. 
• Assign Independent Work.  This is when students would have some time to work on an assignment. The assignment may be Digital Task Cards, a Digital Interactive Notebook, EdPuzzle, etc. During this time, I would remain in the Meet session with myself muted, so students could work without distractions. This allowed me to be available though whenever they had a question.
• Wrap up/Review/Game. About 5-10 minutes before the end of classes we regrouped for a wrap up and review of the lesson. I then gave instructions on anything that needed to be completed before the next lesson. If time allowed, we ended class with a Gimkit (by far my student's preferred choice of game!). 

While this is a basic overview, I hope it allows your mind to get a framework for an online lesson flow that may work for you this year!

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Spanish Interactive Notebooks: 7 Essentials to Get You Started!

If you're giving Spanish interactive notebooks a try for the first time in your Spanish classes, you may be wondering what supplies you will need to be off to a successful start. Here's my detailed photo list of 7 things (plus a bonus FREE download) that you need to get started on your interactive notebook journey! 

**Totally confused about  Spanish interactive notebooks and what they are?? START HERE with this blog post!**

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Tips for Starting Spanish Interactive Notebooks...Part 2

Earlier in the week, I wrote Part 1 of Starting Spanish Interactive Notebooks. You may want to check that out HERE if you haven't already. Today, I wanted to share a few more thoughts that have developed from my use Spanish Interactive Notebooks.

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Tips for Starting Spanish Interactive Notebooks...Part 1

Hi all!! I hope you all have enjoyed your summer as much as I have. Mine was busy, busy, busy and packed full of changes. I'll save all that for another post, but I wanted to publicly address some questions that I've recently received from several readers who are interested in starting Spanish interactive notebooks in their classes this upcoming school year. Thanks guys for inspiring me to jump back on the blog train and share what's worked for me in regards to using Spanish interactive notebooks in my classes. 

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2 Creative Activities for the First Days of Spanish Class

Whew...made it! Week one is over! As always, the first week of school is a bit hectic as the the year gets going. A positive (in most cases) aspect of teaching at a small school is that you pretty much know all of the students before they show up in your classroom. Many of these students are the same students I've had for the past 3 years, so we both know what to expect from each other. :) Here are 2 activities creative activities that we incorporated into our first week of Spanish class!

1. I was excited to have my students make ¿Quién soy yo? banners for the classroom. They enjoyed doing this and they added a nice touch to the bulletin board. Next time, I'll definitely have them write their answers to the prompts in a dark marker. This will definitely show up a lot better and make them easier to read from a distance.

You can grab this activity in my TpT store by clicking the photo below. :)

2. Next, I was really excited to have my students set up their "cuaderno interactivo". Ok, so this took a LONG time. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but it did take awhile to explain the process and add the table of contents and grading rubric. We added the table of contents to the front cover and the grading rubric to the back cover. I plan to grade notebooks at the end of each quarter.

For their first notebook page, I had students brainstorm the topic "5 Reasons to Study Spanish". They then went home and created the page for their first homework assignment. I left the instructions open-ended and just told them to make a colorful graphic which included their 5 reasons. I was pretty pleased with what some of my interactive notebook newbie students came up with!

One student even listed her 5 reasons by drawing Grand Cayman and adding one reason to each of the 5 districts on the island. There's a little Cayman Islands geography lesson for your day. :)

Overall, a great first week!

How was your first week of school?

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Preparing for Back to School in Spanish Class

The time has arrived! You know what I'm talking about! It's officially back to school time. This past week was spent organizing my classroom, attending all the fun meetings, and beginning to wrap my head around the school year. First on the check list was to un-hurricane proof my classroom. Yes, this is an island teacher problem. Every year when school ends in June everything must be wrapped or boxed and moved (as much a possible) towards interior walls. Luckily, we haven't had any first hand hurricane experience since living here, but we still prepare every year. 

Here's a before and after classroom collage!

The interesting thing about my school campus is that it was previously a small apartment complex. It has a pool, which is really cool, but it also has really small classrooms for some of the grades/subjects. I'm thinking my classroom was probably someone's living room at one time...lol! It is definitely small and can fit about 10 desks comfortably. Our maximum class size is 14! Yes, a shocker coming from the US for sure! For my classes that have more than 10 students, I just travel to their class to teach my Spanish lesson.

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