Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Unit: Involucrado para mejorar la comunidad


This unit is soooo great....it feels so authentic!
I've always loved it. (here's our old version that is solid)..but my colleague and I have made some tweaks that are really powerful to create flow as we guide our students to the final evaluation.


First change:  Rename it (again)!  Involucrados para mejorar la comunidad
I wanted to showcase our goal (create a proposal to our partner college to help communities in need of assistance), so the name makes more sense.  I do one daily translation a day and that's with our daily learning target and sometimes I build the title into that procedure.  I just use my magic pointer finger (which requires English which is normally a no-no) and point to what they translate...and I focus on morphemes a lot.  So for example when we translate para as "in order" I immediately put my pointer on the "ar" in mejorar and pause while they say "to" before moving to the root verb and they say "better".

Second change:  Use an authentic photo for my cover page.
No more cute clip art if I can help it.  I want true representation of the target culture and that's great fodder for communication.  We spoke about it various teams throughout the unit because there's a lot going on.  They also asked questions (!!!) about it.  I will promote and encourage authentic questions ALL THE TIME because they are an absolute essential skill for intermediates.

Third change:  re-evaluate our mini themes to ensure that we are giving examples of ways that communities are being helped so the students have a foundation of ideas (and tons of tons of input based on #authres).