Tag spanish

The Best Laid Plans

The Spanish Cave 2 Comments

I have been teaching Spanish for 17 years now. As a result, I know a good deal about children ages 3-10, and the importance of routines and rituals in the classroom. I know how to simplify concepts so that students understand, and I know how to make children laugh when they are crying. I also know that while it is important to plan, many times, plans go awry; and I often wonder why I bother to plan in the first place.

This year has been challenging in many ways, and so, I must be transparent here: there are currently 6.5 days of school left in the year, and I am beyond exhausted. The aftereffects of the hurricane, along with countless events in May, have taken their toll on everyone. In fact, this past Monday, I truly believed that the following day was Friday. (Spoiler alert: it was not.)

If you haven’t been in an elementary school classroom the week before summer break — which, this year, also conveniently happens to be a full moon week — then you will just have to trust me: it’s rough. I adore my students, but it’s rough. Emotions are everywhere. Overreactions abound. Rules are forgotten or only selectively heard. And it is with this picture painted that I walked into PK4 Spanish today without a lesson plan. I had printed out pictures of a gingerbread house, but that was it. Were we studying gingerbread houses? No. Was it Christmastime? No. Why did I do it? No idea.

But the crazy part is, it all worked out; students saved the day. Now don’t get me wrong: planning is crucial to building a predictable and creative classroom environment. But sometimes, just sometimes, you can give yourself permission as an educator to go with the flow. You know what you’re doing. You know your kids. So instead of fighting upstream against the current of last-week chaos, relax and see where the raft leads you downstream. It might just surprise you, in the best of ways.

When I visit the PK4 classroom, students like to greet with me a very excited, “¡Sorpresa!” (surprise!). They are really quiet (hard for four-year-olds), and the surprise is that they are sitting and ready for Spanish class. I act floored every time, and then ham it up, thanking them profusely — ¡Mil gracias! (a thousand thanks)

I had no idea what we would do next on this particular morning, so I stuck with the routine. Surely, this will lead somewhere interesting, right? We did our warm-up action commands, and I asked them how they were. A girl said that she was cold (Tengo mucho frío/ I’m cold), and the silliness began: “Cold like an ice cube? Oh no! Abracadabra, ¡chiquitipuf! Are you an ice cube?!” because exaggerating is like gold with this age group. It’s not just big, it’s BIGGER THAN THE WHOLE UNIVERSE! It’s not just cold, it’s SO COLD THAT PENGUINS WEAR SCARVES! And so on and so forth.

Point being, we decided that no, the student had not turned into an ice cube, but that a nearby — perfectly square — chair certainly looked like an ice cube. It was a peculiar shade of green, but no matter.

AND THEN, the magic happened. Someone shouted out, “Tell us a story!” and I thought to myself, now we have a destination. So we began. I didn’t have a story, but we already had a character–and off we went, sailing into the horizon.

When you have established a character, that’s all you really need. I love the TPRS (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) method of asking a story, and thus proceeded accordingly in the target language.

Class, what do we know? We know that there’s an ice cube. How is he feeling today? Sad? Oh no! Why? What is he doing? He’s running? Why is he running? He’s running away from his house. Poor little thing! What is his house like? It’s big? With a thousand windows? Wow! That’s a lot! There’s a door, too? Oh, and a little door for his puppy?

I can’t draw worth bananas, so I “hired” a student who loves dogs to take ten seconds and draw a dog on the whiteboard. I thanked her, told her to curtsy afterwards, and we all applauded enthusiastically. With older students, I would have them draw a box around their artwork, write Picasso at the bottom, and then have them cross it out and write their name–and milk this moment a little more; but these kiddos are only four, and the applause was enough to put a big smile on her face.

As it turned out, our protagonist Mr. Ice Cube was running away from home because he had a fight with said puppy. Fred the Puppy Dog allegedly threw tomatoes at Mr. Ice Cube, which made him sad and a little angry. Where did Fred find these tomatoes? He took them from one of our students! Poor Jacob was about to bite into a big, juicy hamburger — we had practiced miming the action command, “come una hamburguesa” (eat a hamburger) at the beginning of class, so this fit in perfectly — when Fred stole the tomato right out of his hamburger! And thus ensued a serious tomato fight (I could have brought up La Tomatina here, but wanted to focus on the story).

So Mr. Ice Cube runs away with tomato goo still on his face, and climbs up a tree. In the tree, there is a butterfly, an ice cream cone, and a fish in a fishbowl. This was because students noticed some random magnets on the board (I’m a traveling Spanish teacher this year, so this wasn’t my room), and there were fish, butterfly, and ice cream cone magnets. When they asked if I could put the other “people” magnets in the tree, I replied, “Who are they?”

And the class replied, “GINGERBREAD MEN!“

I almost fell over — and then took out the gingerbread houses that I had printed right before their class. “The clock struck twelve,” — literally, the class ended at noon — and… mic drop out. The teacher assistant looked at me with wide eyes: how in the world did you plan that? Teeheehee. I didn’t.

Sometimes, you can plan down to the minute, and it works out. Sometimes, you can plan down to the minute, and it falls apart. Sometimes, you can not plan, and it doesn’t work out.

But every once in a while, you can not plan, and it does work out. I wouldn’t bank on this method. However, I would like to believe that when you trust in yourself and go with the flow, the chances increase that everything will come full circle.

“Everything works out in the end. If it’s not working out, it’s not the end.”

Bread, Apples, & Pineapples.

The Spanish Cave

The first year I taught about Panama, Pato (my stuffed animal duck) misunderstood because he only heard the first syllable, “pan” (bread) and we went on a wild tangent… which resulted in kindergarteners building a “Bread Castle”. The following year, I decided to try a different approach, and we traveled out to the playground to pretend to “shovel and dig” the Panama Canal in the sandbox with plastic spoons.

When I teach geography, the overarching goal is for young students to make a placeholder or space in their brains for Spanish-speaking countries–and I will do whatever it takes to make the name(s) stick. As they get older, we layer on more culture and language.

A New Lesson

This year, I decided that the time had come to develop this Panama mini-unit into something more meaningful, tighter, better. I wanted to build off of the other years and expand the lesson. Kindergarteners had done an outstanding job the first semester, and I wanted to reward their hard work. I brainstormed long and hard until–POOF! There it was! An Idea! A Marvelous, Wonderfully Fantastic Idea! Or so I hoped. Things are rarely perfect the first time around. But I was determined to give it my best.

Following our beginning-of-class dance party (Rompe Ralph), I started reviewing the Floor Map. We had arrived at the *second* canvas map, which was brand new to students, so they were curious from the start. What’s that?! they wondered. I started to say, “Panama”, but was quickly cut off by Pato after the first syllable. Kindergarteners started laughing when Pato and I began arguing. They loved when Pato came to visit.

ME: It’s Panama, Pato. People speak Spanish there.

PATO: Yes, Ta-nah-nah, that’s what I said [ventriloquism has its limits, which provides terrific fodder for memorable mispronunciations].

ME: Um, no, that’s not quite right…

And so on and so forth. At one point, Pato returned to the ‘pan’ (bread) part of Panama, and began ordering individual students to please bring him pan y café (bread and coffee). I reprimanded him: Pato, that’s not their job! He replied in a whiny voice, “Pero tengo hambre” (but I’m hungry).

There is a balance between stretching out the ‘performance‘ here, while not letting it get too silly or drag on for too long. In other words, the hardest part of these ridiculous interactions (with Me, Myself, and I??) is that as an educator, I know that we eventually need to get somewhere!

In this case, our destination was Panama.

Once we clarified this and Pato more or less grasped the concept, he decided that he wanted to gift someone on the far side of the circle–(students were sitting on the floor around the two maps of Central and South America)–the pan/ bread flashcard that I had been referencing. Pato has a good heart, after all.

I encouraged his altruism, and opened a cabinet to reveal the Popsicle stick barco/ boat that kindergarteners had painstakingly made the previous year. Anyone who was in my class remembered immediately. The barco!!! It was a sweet, quick trip down Memory Lane. But back to the task at hand.

Students carefully passed the Popsicle stick boat to one another around the circle, with Pato sitting inside holding the flashcard that said pan. Finally, it reached the student at the other side of the circle.

PATO: Oh no!

ME: What? ¿Qué?

PATO: I forgot, I wanted to give [So-And-So] an apple/ manzana, too. [But that student was on the other side of the circle. So the boat had to be passed all the way around again, from one kindergartener to the next.]

This was starting to take a long time, and I had to be mindful of not dragging it out too long, but still making the point. We repeated the exercise once more. Then I said–

ME: Hey Pato, there’s a quicker way to get there, you know. You don’t have to go around Chile and Argentina: you can go through Panama.

PATO: What do you mean?

We watched this one-minute video to help him understand. The verbiage is advanced for five-year-olds, but I mostly showed it for the visuals. These are not small boats that go through the Panama Canal!

Pato subtlely shifted his language here and started calling the “gifts” to students “shipments”. He decided to ship boxes of manzanas (apples), piñas (pineapples), and pan (bread) to all of his friends in kindergarten through the Panama Canal. He really liked the new shortcut. It saved so much time!

The aforementioned items might seem random to you, but each year, fourth graders perform a play in Spanish based on my “Pato” character–and I try to preteach the vocabulary to other grade levels so that they understand some of the play. The plot is always different, and this year, the play has two bad guys who have teamed up together: “Bad Apple” (aka Manzana) and “Bad Pineapple” (aka Piña). So there is a rhyme and reason to the madness.

When I introduced this last week, the photocopier and I were having A Serious Argument, and I didn’t get to print out tiny pictures of fruit and bread for kindergarteners to cut out, most unfortunately. Instead, we loaded dominoes and blocks (separated by color) into the small, clear plastic boxes, and then pushed them across a bucket of [real] water.

The lesson broke down here a little because not everyone got a turn as quickly as they wanted (#kindergarten #impatient). But I believe that with a little fine-tuning, we can make the assembly lines work!

Next class, kindergarteners will cut out the tiny pictures of apples, pineapples, and bread, load them into boxes and then boats to ship them across the Canal. If I’m really brave, another group will pretend to “dig” the Canal with plastic spoons and sand.

And somehow, this will all eventually loop back into Chapter Two of their class story about The Huge Cup of Coffee.

#NotCrazyJustPassionate