My first MovieTalk and I loved it. I used the short animation, Alma, with my first year students and it went great. We were able to use the movie to practice so much language:
1) structures of quiere, puede, mira, ve, busca
2) review clothing vocab, review preposition, review some emotions and learn a few new ones

Use wordle to check the frequency of the structures in your story

You can use this with any class/level and focus on any aspect of the language appropriate to your students.

Here’s what I did in my class:

Day 1: Use the 4 minute movie as a Storytelling activity to describe to students what was happening in the video. Every few seconds, pause the movie to describe what is happening and ask the students questions. If you never used MovieTalk, here’s a brief overview of How to MovieTalk. (Another great resource would be MartinaBex)

Day 2: Watch the story again and re-tell, this time in a faster manner. Then have students read the story (Alma story) and fill in the blanks with missing words. Students then make corrections to a series of statements. I copied the text into wordle to check how often I used certain structures. Obviously, when I told the story I am using a lot more repetition, but this can show you if you need to repeat more in your written version as well.

Day 3: A quicker re-tell. Then give students a handout with screenshots from the story and have them re-tell the story orally with a partner. After a few minutes, switch partners so they have to retell the story a few times. I then had students write the story underneath the pictures. I had them count the number of words. Some students topped out at 80 words and others topped out at 175 words. Talk about differentiation!

Day 4: Students use their scripts they wrote the day before to record a narration. They import a PDF file of the storyboard to the iPad app ExplainEverything. With ExplainEverything they are able to record and advance to each picture to give a narration. They exported it to their GoogleDrive and shared with me on GoogleClassroom. With it on their Google Drive, they can show their parents what they are able to do in the language, which makes for good advocacy. Here is an example:

Day 5: Tell another story! Perhaps use the doll at the end of the video to see if another girl comes to the store and gets trapped inside a doll.

For editable version of our story (in both present and past tense) as well as the complete lesson plan of Alma, purchase it TeachersPayTeachers.