![]() As a culminating assignment, in place of a “story retell” I had my students make a video narrating the story in Flipgrid as they acted it out with little paper characters. Today, we read the story I wrote about 3 “characters” in the video. acting out the scene of the woman on the Segway who saw a $100 bill on the ground Students acted out each “scene.” Finally, we watched the video. The students really enjoyed coming up with back stories for each of the people and some were quite elaborate. Before I showed the video at all, I showed the class some screen shots from the video of the prank happening at 3 different places to 3 different people. I also had volunteers come up and we acted out the joke. I told them in Spanish how I made it and explained in Spanish how the joke works. ![]() The first thing I did was show students my own 20 peso bill on a string that I made. Let me tell you…9th graders eat this stuff up! The first lesson involves this video in which some teenagers do the old dollar bill on a string trick. I have 2 movie talks that center on playing harmless pranks. This story was really just for fun, but it played nicely into my next two lessons on practical jokes which also deal with money and wallets. The kids loved it, and I love cats so I am sure my passion was evident. The second story was Sir Whines a Lot, the CA$Hnip kitty. It allowed me to really activate some of the Super Seven verbs and was a great refresher after a summer away from the language and a great playing-field leveler for kids who came from two different language programs and hadn’t been in my classroom before. It is a really great little Cinderella story of a music video. My first story was a movie talk of the music video Darte un beso by Prince Royce. It has been going amazing, and I can see that they are going to do great with one word images and co-created class stories (TPRS). I have been doing some pre-prepared movie talk and ‘news talk’-based stories with them. But even before we begin such a simple novel I wanted to really build a common foundation and make everything simple, slow, and fun. I re-adjusted my list of novels for Spanish 2, moving Esperanza to Spanish 3 and adding Brandon Brown quiere un perro as our first class-novel of the year. It isn’t a 100% perfect dream, but I didn’t say heaven, I said a dream! My classes are small, they are very nice kids who seem to be ready to engage with both the language as well as me and each other, and we have just been having fun. This year, I feel like I am living in a dream. But they were too few and too far between and it was just a hard, hard year. I dare say we had a few enjoyable moments. I felt that I disengaged with them somewhat almost as an act of self-preservation because it seemed no matter what I tried were were never going to get into a groove of joyful acquisition. Spanish was at the bottom of their priority list. Many of the students were already “at risk” and they just seemed to completely veer off course. ![]() I was shaken as well, and wasn’t exactly sure how to comfort grieving teens that I felt I had only just met. The kids, even those who didn’t know the student well, were all really shaken to the core by it. It all just seemed to fall apart after death visited us. I was just starting to build my foundation of trust and develop relationships with my classes. We lost a 9th grade student to suicide less than a month into the year. Last year was really, really hard in Spanish 2. And the underlying foundation of everything I do is showing them that I adore them, and that they are special, and that they CAN DO THIS. In Cenotes, located in the interior of the Yucatan Peninsula and around the city of Merida, in the State of Yucatan, Mexico, you have to dive even deeper to find the Halocline, sometimes well below 25 meters.My mantra for Spanish 2 is all about simple, slow, and fun. When you scuba dive to around 14 meters of depth (depending on the Cenote), you reach the Halocline, a density change between freshwater and saltwater. The top layer of water in the Cenotes in Quintana Roo is freshwater. Half-flooded Cenotes are also accessible for snorkelers and other fun activities like zip-lining, kayaking, and swimming. In some caves and caverns, we can even find ancient Mayan pottery and bones. Today the caves flooded, allowing divers to swim around and enjoy these ancient formations. Yucatan has been under the Ocean’s surface multiple times the last time the Peninsula raised above sea level, underground rivers carved cave systems. To describe them, Cenotes are collapses of the limestone into the UnderGround river systems, which create an entrance into the water.
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