Early Activities

Today I ventured to a new coffee shop in Wichita (Verita Coffee) to try their iced mocha, recommended by a friend. SO good. So that's my plug for today. ;)

I wanted to share an activity I do every year with my Spanish 2 students. I think you can do this with just about any subject, because learning about your students and what they like/dislike is one of the most important things to being a teacher.

I put the rules up on the overhead. One of the other important things I have learned after 3 years is to always have the directions visible to the students. You cannot just read them or say them. They have to be posted.

My rules are: write about your name, age, likes, dislikes and anything else you remember from Spanish 1. I use this as a sort of informal assessment and the kids have no clue that I am assessing their use of simple Spanish that they remember from the previous year.

Here are the examples from this year. The grammar isn't perfect, but the point is to understand where the kids are in their language-learning. For an English class, I would modify it to their level and have a writing prompt about them, possibly throw in some extra credit points for use of last year's vocabulary words?

What types of things do you do for first day activities?