How to Create an End-of-Year Review: Novels

**This lesson will work well as a stand-alone one-week lesson or for pre-teaching structures in Mata la Piñata by Kristy Placido. Additionally, this lesson will be a great addition this fall since it is Zombie themed! Scroll to the bottom to go straight to the download!**

As we near the end of what may go down as the longest school year in the record books, I find myself both longing to be finished and wishing for more time. Yes, you read that correctly, wishing for more time. I feel like we began to hit our stride about mid-January, slid back into some old, bad habits in February, and are now back to running smoothly again.

For the third year in a row, we haven’t quite covered all the content I planned. Much as I would love to rush ahead and cram structures, vocab, and stories into my students’ collective gullets, I know that acquisition doesn’t work that way. It isn’t possible for ME to make THEM acquire Spanish any faster than THEIR BRAINS allow. With that in mind, I’ve been wondering, how can I get the most bang for my buck? We need enjoyable, easy-enough-that-students-feel-confident, yet challenging-enough-that-they-are-motivated-to-continue activities. Small task, right? Ha! This year, I’m using a novel. (Let’s face it, one of the best things we can do for our students it provide them with quality, enjoyable reading material. So many good things happen in the brain when we read: we learn word order, spelling, finer grammatical points, and more!) Here’s how I’m doing it…

Step 1: Choose a novel

This year, I chose Kristy Placido’s Mata la Piñata and with her permission, I created a week-long intro lesson to reinforce some vocabulary before we begin.

Why I chose this novel

Lots of reasons!

It uses a wide variety of structures we’ve covered this year.
It is right at or below students’ collective reading level, so we can zip through the chapters.
The main character is definitely relatable.
The Teacher’s Guide is PACKED with fun activities.
There is a zombie. Seriously, what is more fun than reading about zombies with your high schoolers? Not much!

Step 2: Identify your list of important structures by chapter. Words/phrases that are:

High frequency in the overall L2 (these are important structures for students to acquire).
Low frequency in the overall L2 but important to the understanding of the novel (these words are often repeated enough for the novel to provide the repetitions).
Overall low frequency in the L2 lexicon only appear once or twice in the novel (these words I just write on the board with the English translation).
Cognates – seriously! It isn’t a cognate for your students if it doesn’t look like a word in English. It’s very helpful to have this list in advance.

Step 3: Pre-teaching (or in my case, reviewing) important structures

I’m not gonna lie, I searched a bit to find this little gem of a school-appropriate Zombie Movie Short:

“Hungry Zombie” CGI Animated Short Film

Once you have your structures, use them to create the story of the movie short you’re using. I chose iba a, empezó a, tuvo, and fue. I created 15 or 20 screenshots that I used to tell this story. **Pro tip, use Slidesgo.com – so much variety and creativity!!**

Step 4: Create a Reading to go along with your story

This can be as easy as copying and pasting your sentences on your slides or as complicated as you choose. For this Clip Chat, I created two versions: Versión 1 is the basic story, but students choose the correct structure to use in the sentences (either / or style). Versión 2 is the simplified version again, but at the end there are 7 additional details. Students handwrite the details into the story where they make the most sense.

Step 5: Students re-write the story

I almost always include a Timed Write in my story plans. I’m not sure what the exact science behind it is, but I’ve noticed that writing newly-acquired structures in this way really aids students’ access to them in the future. I´m not sure if synapses are cemented or grown in different areas of the brain. Either way, regular Timed Writes really help my students.

Step 6: Give ’em something to talk about

This is always my last step. Orally retelling a super familiar story aids in future spontaneous production. I usually have students speak in teams where one student begins and the next one has to pick up where the last one left off. That way, everyone has to pay attention.

And there you have it! It’s not a complicated process, but it does require some prep. Sometimes I add in cultural information or geography or a song. It all depends on a) how much time I can devote to planning and teaching, and b) how deep the novel is in characters, storyline, and culture.

Click here for your own editable copy of El Zombi Hambriento and here for the editable readings. Get them quickly because they’ll be added to my TPT store in a few days!

More end-of-year (or semester) resources: