This should be titled “Post Reading and Viewing Activities” because they can certainly be used as follow up activities for viewing, as well.
Oral Summaries
My level 4’s are really good at describing scenes and actions orally. Better than I could have ever imagined! However, their narration skills are well… kind of boring. They can talk in paragraphs, but those paragraphs don’t make for very interesting listening. That’s why we are beginning to focus on filler words by using Carrie Toth’s Yellow Brick Road Retell. Follow the link to her TPT store for this resource in Spanish, German, French, English, Japanese, and Mandarin! Here, I shrank her printables down to all fit on one page and made card sets that I can easily store in a Ziploc bag. I made enough card sets for pairs or groups of three.
Students took turns speaking about scenes in the movie, También la Lluvia. We watched this movie as part of our water scarcity unit that includes this myth about Abuela Grillo from the CCC Spanish Store. You can also find the excellent and very thorough resources for the movie here. (Watch the movie first! There is a lot of foul language that may not work in your school environment. I only show it to my level 4’s and only with a permission slip.)
I was amazed at how much students had to say and at how much more interesting their speaking was as a result of this activity!
Hula Hoop Venn Diagrams
The other activity we have done to help us focus our thinking and speaking is Hula Hoop Venn Diagrams. So much more fun than writing them on the board or on paper!
First, I passed out papers that had events from our movie on them.
Students read their events to themselves and decided where to place them in the diagram. Then they read them aloud. I asked for volunteers and we went in random order.
After each event was placed, we discussed as a class if we agreed or disagreed with the placement of the event and explained why we agreed/disagreed.
This was a very fun way of engaging my heritage, native, and second language learners.
More comparisons for Hula Hoop Venn Diagrams:
- Compare your community to the one in the movie/book
- Compare characters in the story
- Compare self to a character in the story
- Compare historical events to today
- Compare what students would do in a situation to what characters did in the situation
