One of my absolute, all time FAVORITE pages on TPT is Mundo De Pepita.  This page is fabulous for elementary Spanish teachers. Julie, who runs the site, is very active on twitter and we’ve been exchanging tweets and email for about a year now.  I hope to meet her in person sometime soon! She is a fabulous language teacher. Her TPT store has resources in Spanish, French, Russian, and I believe she has a background in German, too.  All of her artwork is original and done by herself. Her activities are pretty much all proficiency-based and great for novice and intermediate elementary language learners.

One of the mini-books that I purchased for her page last year, which I will link here, is called Yo Soy.  I really love this mini book because it teaches my students how to use Yo Soy in a very simple and basic way.  Sometimes as language teachers, we unrealistically want our students to learn everything. In the case of Yo Soy, we want to teach them every single way they can describe themselves with every single word possible.  But what Julie has done with this mini-book is chosen six descriptive words that are interesting and relatable for most elementary students. My students identify with these words because they are very common ways they describe themselves.

I’ve been using this mini-book to anchor most of my lessons with the third grade for the past couple of weeks.  They learned what each descriptive word means, they learned how to describe themselves, and they learned masculine versus feminine word endings.  We’ve done a lot of different activities with these words and I wanted to share an extension activity I did with my classes last week.

As some of you know, the spring weather in New England is just not coming.  Right now, the weather is so so terrible even though it is April and we should be transitioning to spring. Usually it is a lot warmer by now in Massachusetts and so I decided that I wanted to find a way to bring spring into the classroom to make it feel a little bit warmer than it actually is.  So, I came up with this flower activity.  Students write “yo soy” in the middle of the flower and around the petals they choose words from Julie’s mini-book that describe themselves.  I did tell the students they did not have to fill in every single flower petal but most of them did because they felt every word in the book described themselves.

This activity was great because it provided opportunities for student choice.  I gave my students the background paper and the center of the flower.  Outside of that, they were allowed to create the petals on their own.  They chose the color, the style, and the rest of the decorations on their own. I’ve posted below a few photos of student work so you can see how each child took this activity in their own direction.  My students are truly unique – just like flowers – and they really let that shine through this activity.

I will most definitely be using this activity again next year as it was extremely successful with my classes.

If you want to see more posts like this, be sure to subscribe to my blog!  You will receive an email every time I post new content.