Movie Talks!

Movie Talks are such a wonderful way to practice repetition in the target language while using technology. We begin by finding a movie short on YouTube. I found one that was perfect for practicing the past tense. "Anya" is such an endearing story, the kids responded positively to this activity.

This story is such a wonderful way for students to learn about real situations across the globe while using the target language at a comprehensible level. The story of Anya is about an orphaned girl who arrives at an orphanage in Russia back in 1996. We practiced words such as "era" ad "tenía". I pre-taught many of the words I knew they did not know ahead of time. WE created signs and/or motions for many of them. 

I did the Movie Talk with them and stopped frames and discussed each one in Spanish, asked questions, and reflected on the situation in the story, we then played the video with sound without interruptions. The kids responded very positively to the story.

So, it was such a great lesson in past tense, I created a story using the vocabulary words we were working on and had my students "Volleyball Read" it together. It was strictly a narration and I purposely chose not to include dialog. It was a great success! 

I took this lesson even further, and had them create a cartoon that plugged in the possible dialog or thoughts, of the characters in the frames they chose. Using Snagit, we cut frames from the movie short and used these to create our very own comic strips. They chose 3-6 frames, used PicMonkey to create a comic strip with the "collage" tool, then they inserted word/thought balloons with unique the text features.The beauty of this lesson, was the fact that the kids had to insert the dialog in the target language that was not present in the story. They had to infer what the characters might be thinking or saying since there was no dialog in the movie (with the exception of two single word phrase). This lesson was exciting for them and gave them skills to create. They included this in the e-portfolios as well and gave some great feedback. They were very excited to create these from scratch. I loved that it was evident what they inferred in the frames they chose.