We just finished up our La Llorona Unit, which was our first story in Spanish 1 that we introduced in the past tense. Our prior stories this year were all present tense. Our Llorona story featured the background of the legend itself and then included a brief movietalk.

We had the following targeted structures written on the board throughout the story. We used the 3rd person past tense to narrate the story and by incorporating student actors, we could ask the actor a question in the tú form and have them respond in the yo form to get reps of the 1st and 2nd person in present tense.

Students were already familiar with the structures of tiene and busca as well as the present tense of hay, está, and es. Through the background story of La Llorona students received input of these targeted structures.

Day 1 was the story telling and movie talk. On Day 2, I used screen shots of the movietalk and read captions of each slide and asked comprehension check questions.

The next activity was a new reading activity, similar to a Volleyball translation, but this time the students only translated the verbs. This is a nice alternative to volleyball readings, because it is a novelty, and since it is less work for the students, they are more engaged to translate 1 word outloud instead of a whole story.

In this case, I projected the story on the board. As I read the story in Spanish anytime there was a verb, I paused and the students shouted out its translation. For this first time, since the activity was new and the tense was new, I bolded the verbs. As we progressed on to later paragraphs the words were not bolded.

For example, you reads the story aloud and the class would shout out the translations in English. It would sound like this:
“Había (THERE WAS) una mujer que se llamaba (WAS CALLED) María. María era (WAS) una mujer muy bonita. La mujer tenía (HAD) un esposo. El esposo era (WAS) muy guapo.”

You can also try  incorporating this strategy with a Buzz Reading activity to get in extra reps of the story.

For the editable Llorona Lesson plan with Verb Shout activity included, check it out on our TeachersPayTeachers page.