March 29 - Reflections from Spanish class

My overall arching goal for this class was to introduce numbers in the context of a practical and useful scenario.  Since the majority of students have cell phones, I decided to use phone numbers as my real-life scenario for use of numbers 1-10.

I created my lesson as technology-heavy, using songs and visuals for numbers.  I mixed the abstract visuals (pictures of dogs) with actual candy that we had brought from the U.S.  However, when I started class the computer crashed multiple times.  On my first song, the computer froze, so I used an alternate method while the computer loaded up.  I had students repeat numbers as a whole, then I assigned them numbers to repeat when I pointed to them.  I returned to this scenario twice since the computer froze again.  In the meantime my cooperating teacher ran to get a cable that would go directly from my laptop into the system.  Even still the visuals were very limited.

I also reordered my lesson.  I had included an activity in which students guess the number of candies in a Ziploc bag.  This, of course, did not depend on technology, and it was a stand-alone activity, assessing the basic knowledge of numbers.  Since we had done whole-class repetition of numbers (a rather boring way to introduce numbers) and had individuals state numbers, students had at least been introduced to the numbers.  I repeated this activity after the technology issues had been resolved and students had yet another opportunity to work with the numbers.

For my final assessment, I used an activity that I had done with my Spanish 101 students at UK.  I had students write down phone numbers, put them in a hat, then read the phone numbers they’ve drawn from the same hat and stand when they hear their number read.  This assesses both visual and oral number recognition and is a vital skill for exchange of phone numbers.

It is important to note that all of my Spanish classes have been attended by at least three observers, some of whom have participated as well.  After this class, one of the observers gave me the feedback that students might have been uncomfortable sharing their phone numbers.  I had given them the option of making up a phone number, but as was mentioned, the students did not have enough language to understand that option.  Also, Chinese phone numbers are quite long and the students that participated in the activity had to repeat the numbers twice.  In the future I will modify this activity.  Instead of requesting numbers, I could give number pairs of shortened telephone numbers and do the same thing.