It doesn’t matter if it’s the first or the 20th year teaching, the feeling of the butterflies in the stomach always comes back on the first day of school, and I had mine this week!
Every year I have new students so I put together a book or a powerpoint. This year I decided to go with a Prezi presentation – I used the free version. I included pictures of my family and Colombia and shared them with my students. I used this with my second and third grade classes. At the end of my presentation we played a game called “Falso o Cierto,” and it was basically questions about my presentation. I asked questions such as ¿Es tu maestra de español de Costa Rica?, ¿En la familia de tu maestra de español hay 5 personas? and the children had to answer if it was false or true. They seemed to enjoy playing this game. Many of them participated, and the new ones got to learn something about me.
After the game we played “pasa la bola,” and students had to answer, using full sentences, when asked ¿Cómo estas? and also ¿Cómo te llamas?
They needed a little bit of movement, we reviewed colors and the shared about their favorite color before playing the “color, colorcito ” game.
(image taken from the Boston Children’s museum website)
It was time to settle down and talk about the rules in class. Toward the end of last school year, I started using “Whole Brain Teaching“in my class. I had great results, so I decided to implement it from the outset of this school year.
We went over the first 5 classroom rules and practiced them a lot!
At the end of class, I used an oral “exit ticket” about the rules and then they went to line up to go back to their classrooms.
It was a simple lesson, but it seemed to be a good fit to start the new school year. If you were wondering if this all happened in Spanish, yes, it did! Modeling a lot, using TPR, and tons of visuals help! It was a 45 minute period too!
Have a wonderful school year!
Carolina
Que buenas ideas! En mi escuela ya empezaron las clases pero las de español comienzan el 11 de sep, asi que todavia estamos planeando lecciones y organizando los salones. Me gustaria mucho ver como es tu salon para tener mas ideas para el nuestro y saber como te va con el uso del WBT ya que pleneo usarlo este año. GRACIAS!
Lina, gracias por tu comentario. Este año decidí tener el salón muy simple y con mucho espacio para hacer actividades con movimiento. Tan simple que ya no tengo un escritorio para mi. Aún tengo carteles (no muy grandes) con las frases necesarias para usar en clase.
Con WBT me ha ido muy bien, pues está muy conectado con TPR. Si visitas el link de WTB, y tambien si buscas en Youtube las 5 reglas básicas, te dará muchas ideas de como usarlo en clase. ¡Qué tengas un súper año escolar!