Pruebitas and Shaving Cream Grammar
Spanish 2
Learning Target: I can describe a past experience through writing and speaking using a series of sequenced sentences with essential details and simple elaboration.
Overall Goal
My Spanish 2 students created children's books in Spanish and went to Central Elementary School to read their books to classes of Pre-K Spanish-speaking students. Before they were able to do this, they had to understand how to use the preterite tense in Spanish so that they could write about what happened in their stories.
Formative Assessment #1 - Pruebitas
To do this, we took notes and practiced over time. Then, we took a series of quizzes , called pruebitas (mini quizzes), to check for understanding. Each day, for five days, students took a short quiz that focused on the conjugation of a certain set of regular or irregular Spanish verbs in the preterite tense. This gave the students a chance to focus on a specific section of this difficult verb tense and gave them immediate feedback to improve for the next day's quiz, or retake previous quizzes as needed.
Formative Assessment #2 - Shaving Cream Grammar
Before the final quiz, we did an activity of Shaving Cream Grammar to check for understanding and fix any errors before the quiz. For Shaving Cream Grammar, I wrote a subject and verb infinitive on the board. Students put shaving cream on their desks, just like in elementary school, and wrote the conjugation of the verb in the shaving cream. This is a similar concept to using white boards, but the students enjoyed the flashback to elementary school with the shaving cream. We went through about 10 verbs before taking the quiz. Some students got them all right the first time with the shaving cream, but most of them had to make corrections and learned the correct forms from the activity.