This assignment was borrowed from the great Señor Wooly. I used his market place idea in my 7th grade Spanish 1 class for a unit involving classroom objects (la mochila, la calculadora, etc.) and numbers (0-100). To start, I gave my students a basic script for how to behave in a market place. They then went through various simulations in which they had to buy and sell different objects. I put strict rules in place -- absolutely no English --- during the practice rounds, and they quickly discovered what ideas they needed to know in order to communicate effectively.
Interestingly, I didn't formally "teach" the numbers to them when I introduced this unit, even though I knew that I wanted them to learn the numbers 30 - 100 by the time "test" day rolled around; the competition of the market place caused students to learn the numbers on their own. They were incentivized to learn the numbers so they could compete against each other and "survive" the game. Here's how everything worked: I divided my students into even groups of buyers and sellers and gave them a stack of fake money, which I had made on the photocopiers ahead of time. For each simulation, there were two winners: (1) the seller who made the most money, and (2) the buyer who had the most cash left over. I awarded 2 points of extra credit to the winners, but the real goal was to stay in Spanish the whole time. Students worked off of a rubric I had created, which featured categories like:
I did not follow up with a written component to this spoken assessment, but plan to create one when I teach the unit again. The video is of my students practicing their buying and selling skills in class. They are still using scripts at this point, and you can hear some English sneak out. On test day, however, they were off script and were careful to stay in Spanish, since staying in the target language was part of their grade.
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Last year, instead of giving a typical final exam -- 10 photocopied pages, mostly multiple choice -- I decided to offer my Spanish 1 class an "alternative assessment." I figured a paper exam would only show me a portion of what they could do with the language. I wanted to create a more dynamic opportunity to test their skills. What would they really need to do with the language in the real world? What could they realistically achieve, given that they were at the novice level? What 21st century skills could I incorporate into this assginment? I collaborated with Michigan Teacher of the Year Matinga Ragatz, as well as my own colleagues in Boston, to create a final exam that centered around the creation of a celebrity fan page.
The basic project was for students to work in pairs to create a website about their favorite celebrity. The content of the site was based off of 32 questions, which I gave the students ahead of time, and which covered the content of the beginning Spanish course:
The exam itself was divided into two parts: an oral component and a written component. The oral component took place over several days because each student had to have a turn. The written component took place during one 1.5 hour period a few days after. For the written exam, students read through a "print out" of a celebrity website. I had created a mock website on Word about a Spanish soccer player, and they had to read through the packet and answer many of the same 32 questions in written format. The video up top is of a student pair answering questions about their favorite celebrity, Will Ferrell. They make some grammar mistakes, but they understood the questions and spoke with fluidity, which were two categories I strongly emphasized on their rubric for this project. The screen shot below is a picture of the top half of the home screen for a celebrity project on Taylor Swift. I even changed the formatting of my own blog to have this look because I liked the way the students designed their site so much! |
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