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MMM26 voting opens
Our playlist is set, our bracket is ready for printing, and resources are being added daily to the collaborative drive.
If you haven’t participated in the past, make it right, by joining hundreds of Spanish classes nationwide in our 13th annual music tournament. Locura de Marzo, Mania musical de marzo, or simply just March Music Madness, it is known by many names, but one thing is consistent: kids love it! Have questions? Check out our FAQ page.
Before March 2 voting opens, you can start playing the songs in class. You can find what you need on our MMM26 Homepage or support the hours we put into planning this even by purchasing the unit on TpT. And join our Teacher Group page to come together with other teachers.
At the 2025 Illinois Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ICTFL) fall conference, I attended a session by Rachel D’Onofrio and Curt Gladstein from Evanston Township High School. Their session called “Low Prep Activities to Encourage Student Connection” gave super quick activities to build community with students. The activities could be done in the target language or in English when necessary. One of their activities was a puzzle piece where students fill out a puzzle piece with information about themselves. They could draw things that represent themselves such as what is important to them or what they like to do. Once their visual is complete, they present it to a small group.
One aspect I appreciated was a handout that allowed students to record what they learned about the presenter and identify what they have in common. Whether completed in writing or used to guide a discussion, this activity supports community-building by helping classmates learn about one another. It encourages students not only to recognize individual uniqueness but also to notice shared experiences and interests.
Continue readingLooking for a novel way to teach about the legend of El Cucuy, but don’t want to do the traditional activities of CI? I had to think about how I could get my students to be familiar with the story and be able to provided super simple Spanish input. A book by Joe Hayes was the answer.
This is an activity I did years ago and always thought I blogged about it, but never did… until now.
This year was my first year using the book LA LUCHA by Melisa Lopez from FluencyMatters/Wayside Publishing. The book is a historical fiction book about a teenager year old named Javier who works in the fields picking crops alongside his dad. Javier hears about a movement lead by Cesar Chavez and wants to join, despite his father’s objection. It’s a great book that brings in our US history of the Farmworker’s Movement, and the work of Chavez. It is written in the past tense, and is probably ideal for 2nd or even 3rd year students. I managed to use it with my 8th graders in their second year of level 1. The teacher’s guide was super helpful as well. Here are some other resources that I used during the novel:
Continue readingIf you are reading a novel in your Spanish class, we’ve got a new activity that you may want to try. My 8th-grade class is currently reading “La Lucha” by Melisa Lopez. After reading chapter 6, I had students take out a piece of paper and review the chapter and come up with a list of 20 words they felt were most representative or most important to the events of the chapter. It had to be individual words or small phrases of 1-3 words, words that shouldn’t be separated. After they had their own list, I had them work with a partner and share lists. If a word appeared on each partners’ list, they would circle that word and see how many words they had in common. Then, I had partners join another group and as a larger group (of 4+) they had to come to a consensus on the top 10 most essential words from the chapter. The discussion about why a word was important or why one word was more important than another was great to hear. (Note: At this level, the discussion was happening in L1).
Each group then wrote their final 10 words up on the board, and we compared them all. I asked groups if they wanted to make any changes to their lists now that they had seen other groups’ list. Groups debated on whether to stick with their lists or to swap a word out for another.
By having them make their own list, they had to go through the chapter again. Anytime you can find ways for a student to look at a text more than once is a win. They also needed to know what the words meant in order to determine how important it was. So, if they weren’t using the glossary or reading for comprehension the first time, they would need to do so to come up with their list.
By having them work in pairs, they were able to hear additional words and the partners could discuss in a small setting what the words meant or why they choose that word.
The larger group discussion made them really try and evaluate what words were most essential and why.
You could even combine the lists from all classes into a spreadsheet and see what the most chosen words were.
A follow-up to this might be having students write a summary of the chapter using those 10 words their group came up with or write a paragraph using as many words as they can. I even thought about having them use AI to input those 10 words and ask the AI to generate a short story using those words, given the context of the story, and have students read those paragraphs so they get additional input of those terms.
What other follow-up ideas do you have?
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SpanishPlansMMM24
The 11th annual March Music Madness tournament is approaching and teachers are gearing up. Our MMM24 homepage has what you need. Don’t miss what students consistently call their favorite part of the year. Our 2024 bracket features 16 current songs (all from the past year) from 25 different artists, hits songs that are currently played on the radio, with over 3 BILLION streams.
New to the craze and looking for more information? Check out our new FAQ page. Any questions
Here’s all the links you need to get started: Continue reading
Next week I’ll be using the Spanish Lottery video of Justino with materials from the Comprehensible Classroom. In order to preview the story I used a Mad Libs activity, generated by ChatGPT which I fined-tuned. Students worked with a partner: they first wrote the words on a list. Then they asked their partner for their words to fill in the text. They then read the completed text to their partner.
Here’s a free copy of the activity.
You can also do it together as a class by taking suggestions from the class, writing in their answers, and reading the story together.
After different variations over the years, [FVR (Free Voluntary Reading], Lectura Libre, SSR (Silent Spanish Reading), among others] I’ve again renamed our reading time in class to ISR: Independent Spanish Reading.
To kick things off this year, we read for several days in a row giving students a chance to finish a book. We had already read 1 book together as a class to start the year (Capibara con Botas) so I started ISR with the easiest book that I had in my collection. When students finished reading, they submitted their name with the book they read, and I created posters to hang in the hall with the book cover and the names of the students who read them:
This visual showcases how much our students are reading, and students take pride in finding their name on the posters. As we continue, I will add additional books that are part of our library.
You can download the ISR poster here.
Continue reading
It’s that time of year again…. summer break is coming to an end for me and I’ll be back in the classroom for year 17 soon. Here are a few things we’ve been up to over the summer to help make YOUR transition back to the classroom an easier one.
With more and more teachers needed new ways to show student growth to administration, these two projects are just what every teacher needs. Our first product is our Timed Writing Prompts for any language with a timed-writing sheet to count words and FOUR original storyboards. Featuring six panels of a sequenced story, students write as much as they can in 5 minutes. The best part is using the Excel Spreadsheet or Google Sheet that inserting student data, which will then calculate the amount of growth. Check the video preview on the product page for more info! This will definitely save you tons of time and impress your administration.
Our next student growth assessment features vocabulary where students write the translation for 100 common words. After ten minutes, the teacher reads the answers, and students count up the number of words they’ve identified correctly. Teachers input the data and watch the scores go up each time. Need to test specific words? No worries, the testing sheet also comes in an editable format.
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Our next bundle is a LIMITED TIME offer and you won’t find it during sale time… it’s already a huge saving of 25% off our most popular beginning-of-the-year materials and lessons.
And lastly, this project we did at the end of last school year. Each semester my students read a Hispanic-
related novel from the library. I typically don’t have them do anything other than read, but with this easy to use digital template, I think it’s a great way for students to recommend books to their classmates and their peers to see what books are about. The template is 100% editable and be can shared digitally with students to complete for a professional printout when completed.
And if you have a FVR library, stay tuned; we have an upcoming product that you may be interested in. Make sure you are subscribed to our store to be notified when it’s posted.
And finally, our Google Slides Calendar Talk templates provide 9 different slides to choose from, allowing you to discuss the date and highlight interesting events that occur on that date, such as celebrity birthdays and “On this day in history…”. Wonderful way to use the target language to discuss something interesting.
How close is March 6? SOON! And so for our 10th year, we are hosting our biggest raffle yet!
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SpanishPlansMMM23
Before we get to the prizes and how to enter, here are some necessary links:
This year our top prize is our Set of 21 Spanish Speaking Countries Stamps, something that we have
never raffled off before, a $200 value. Our second prize is $50 worth of resources from SpanishPlans. Our third prize is a $25 gift card to Amazon. And finally, a $10 gift certificate to TeachersPayTeachers. We have 9 different ways to enter. Visit our rafflecopter page to enter.
SpanishPlans.org 