Señora Jota Jota

Teaching content and culture through proficiency-driven instruction

I love having a variety of post-reading activities “up my sleeve.” Keeping things novel in the classroom is important because the human brain quickly adapts to whatever stimulus is provided. Fun, exciting activities become old and boring very quickly. When various activities are used sparingly, your language classroom stays shiny and bright.

Recently, Martina Bex created customizable ¡Cataplún! cards. Knowing that everything she creates is a huge hit with my students, I went directly to her TPT store and purchased my own set!

I am so glad I did!

My favorite post-reading activities cause students to go back and reread the text. The benefit to reading is READING, after all. I spent a few minutes after school yesterday customizing and printing enough sets that students could play in groups of three or four. Each set was a different color (to make the sorting easier for me at the end).

You can see that students all have a copy of the reading on their desks.

I altered the directions a bit because 1) I’m all about simplicity and 2) I can never remember the rules if there are more than just a few!!

When it is your turn, you select a card from the pile. Answer correctly, keep the card. Answer incorrectly, the card goes in the discard pile. Teammates fact-check answers by rereading. If your card says “¡Cataplún!“(kaboom! in English), you lose all your cards. The student with the most cards at the end of class, wins.

I love this game for many reasons:
  • SUPER easy to customize, print, and cut out.
  • Adaptable to MANY classroom review activities.
  • Students STAY in the L2 the entire class period with zero prompting from me!!
  • The game runs itself – I have very little to monitor.
  • You can use it to lighten up a heavy topic (we are studying the Spanish Civil War… it can get a little depressing!).
  • As with everything from The Comprehensible Classroom, all the hard work was already done for me!!
  • Did I mention how easy it was???
What are your favorite post-reading activities?