Not your average health unit

foto por USP Hospitales

A unit on health is common in Spanish class. We have a unit in Spanish 2 on describing ailments and visiting the doctor. Then in AP I have a unit called "Cuidándome a mí" (taking care of myself). It's useful -last year's AP essay was health-related- but for AP I wanted to go beyond the typical reflexive verb, sickness phrases, doctor questions vocabulary and activities. Besides, our principal asked us this year to focus on hands-on learning with our students. So how could I make the learning hands-on, relevant, and connected to communities and culture?

Every unit in AP contains four performance assessments: interpersonal speaking, presentational speaking, interpersonal writing, and presentational writing. I've had a focus in this unit for the past two or three years on healthcare and undocumented immigrants, but this year I wanted it to really matter. Here are the assignments we did for each:

1) Interpersonal speaking

One student played a doctor's receptionist, and the student being assessed was someone in the doctor's office. I was a mother whose child needed a chicken pox vaccine in order to go to school, but didn't have any health insurance or much money. So the receptionist won't let me make an appointment, and the student had to explain to me that I could get the vaccine at the health department. To complete this task my students had to a) get the address and phone number of the health department in our city, b) identify language options at the health department, c) find out what kind of care is offered at the health department, d) find out whether undocumented immigrants can get care at the health department, and e) understand how services are paid for at the health department. And these students had never even heard of the health department!

Here's April completing this task.

2) Presentational speaking

Scenario: The local Latino community is having a town hall meeting to talk about local health care options. Several local political leaders are attending (with translators). Based on an article about undocumented children in the health reform debate and a video about a baby's life being saved at Seattle Children's Hospital, present a 2-minute argument about why undocumented immigrant children should or should not receive healthcare services at health departments and hospitals.

3) Interpersonal writing

Students had to locate a doctor in the city who spoke Spanish. This involved actually calling the offices to verify that they had Spanish-speaking staff and to get their address. Then they wrote a letter to the doctor explaining what they had learned about the undocumented and/or uninsured Spanish-speaking community and encouraging the doctor to get involved in free or low-cost clinics in the area. We are mailing these letters.

4) Presentational writing

Students wrote a lengthy letter to our Congressman, John Yarmuth. Based on a Pew Hispanic Center study, comments by the Republican presidential candidates, and a radio program addressing changes in the California MediCal access laws, students addressed such questions as:

-what is the most reasonable response to the healthcare crisis?

-if we treat everyone indiscriminately, will healthcare costs rise to an unsustainable level?

-how can we control costs for those who can't pay without overburdening society?

-what kinds of healthcare are human rights and what aren't?

-what do we do with undocumented children who had no say in their legal status?

-should undocumented immigrants receive healthcare anywhere, or only in certain places?

-how can we inform undocumented immigrants on their healthcare rights and options?

I am going to write an English-language note to accompany these letters, explaining what we did to Mr. Yarmuth and telling him that my students care enough about the Latino community that they have taken the time to learn their language, and if he will take the time to find someone to translate their letters, he will get some interesting opinions, as well as getting a taste of what language negotiation immigrants have to go through to become informed. Then I'll mail them.

I actually posted about this unit two years ago, but I think now it's become a lot more relevant and service-oriented.

App review: Tour Wrist

A couple of weeks ago on #Langchat, the Thursday night (8 ET) chat by and for language teachers on Twitter, we discussed iPad (and other iOS) apps that may be useful in the world language classroom. That night I downloaded something like 25 free apps and since then I've been on a mission to see what they can do in my classroom. In my Spanish 3, we have 2 iPods and 1 iPad, and in AP, we have 2 iPads and 3 iPods. Not ideal, but enough to have a little fun.

Our first unit in Spanish 3 was on things we do with friends and family for fun ("Esparcimiento"), and included some talk about travel, as well as concentrating on expressing opinions with deeper vocabulary than "Sí, me gusta." The interpersonal speaking assessment involved me having a conversation with them (about a sports game) so-- what do the rest do while I'm talking to 1? Enter Tour Wrist.

tour wrist home page

Tour wrist is a free app that lets you do virtual tours of more than 23,000 places all over the world. You can look at the Tour of the Day (or obviously, home, hotel, or photographer of the day) but more useful is the "Browse all tours" function. That takes you to a map of the world.

tour wrist map - Central America

You can use two fingers to enlarge any part of the map to see more of what's there. Now, the offerings in Latin America are not exactly extensive, but the app is a whole lot of fun. As you focus in, more and more green placeholders show up. Tapping on one will tell you what it is, and tapping on the arrow on its title will take you to the tour.

This is where you find the best feature - by holding your device at eye level, you can turn around and see the 360-degree view as if you were there. Really, you can hold it up and look at the sky, or down and look at the floor.

Tour of bridge in Medellín, Colombia

Anyway, what do you do with this in class? While I was doing the interpersonal conversation with individual students, the others had to work in pairs to find a tour in a Spanish-speaking country and answer the following questions:

1. What is it?

2. Where is it?

3. Do you like it?

4. Why or why not?

They did this for at least two places.

The students really enjoyed the app, of course, but more importantly, they were using their recent targets (expressing reasons for opinions) to talk about places I could never take them to. I did have one pair choose random places in the Caribbean or someplace. I told them later that if they were doing something that didn't have much to do with Spanish or places where people speak Spanish, they probably had the directions wrong.

So- it would be nice if there were more tours available in the places we were looking, but it's a stylish, user-friendly, free app for all iOS devices, lots of fun for all involved.

What ideas do you have for Tour Wrist in the world language class?

Getting vocabulary from a tweet

You never know what you're going to pick up from following tweets from pop culture icons like @jesseyjoy or @juanes, or from news sources like Venezuela's version of Fox News @globovision or Honduran @diariolaprensa. A great tweet came through today as an example.

One of my favorite groups, the Mexican trio Camila, tweets mainly through two accounts, @pablocamila (the guitarist) and CamilaMX, the official twitter. Mario Domm has an account @dragondomm but he doesn't tweet terribly frequently.

Today this tweet came from @pablocamila:
Quién irá a ganar este partido? Cuál fue la predicción de mi tocayo el pulpo?

In less than 140 characters, you have the vocabulary word 'tocayo' (I don't know when I acquired that word but it's a fun one to have), future for the concept of "I wonder" (extra interesting in the ir + a construction), cuál instead of qué as the question word, and the whole phenomenon of this prognosticating octopus Pulpo Pablo, which is frankly, just flat weird, but hey--by the time you watch videos and read articles about him choosing Spain to win it all (as of this writing the game is tomorrow, so we'll see if he's right), and why not throw in some video of Spain searching for their own Pulpo Paul, not to mention the wealth of hilarious stuff there is to find out there about Argentinian chefs putting octopus paella on the menu ad nauseum, your students will never forget the word for octopus and get some really funny culture mixed in their language acquisition in the process.

Every Spanish teacher should be on Twitter. Start by following me, @secottrell, and looking at my lists of language teachers and music, and follow them. From there it's a yellow brick road.

It's 19 de noviembre!

19 De Noviembre - Carlos Vives

Take advantage of today's date to play Carlos Vives' song 19 de noviembre. Here are some ways to use it:

Listening:
-See if they can hear the date at the beginning without seeing it (Spanish 1).

Culture:
-Tell students to look under "Historia" in this article to see why 19 de noviembre is an important day in Puerto Rico.
-Offer a bonus to someone who can find out why a Colombian singer wrote a song about Puerto Rico. (Interesting that now he and the 2nd wife he wrote the song for are separated.)

Vocabulary:
-patriotic words (evident even for low learners)

Grammar:
-preterite tú forms (almost as good as Qué Hiciste)
-good example of passive se in "se oyen" (hard to find in songs)
-yo/tú future switch
-pronouns, esp. yo reflexives and a rare double-object on double verb phrase in 'te lo quiero agradecer'

Enjoy--it's a good song!

Cultural connections: Four songs to explore using Google Earth

I recently got permission to download Google Earth and it is addictive. For class, we've used it to look at the cropland around the towns in California where Francisco Jimenez grew up as a migrant child. We've used it to explore as much as possible the trip up the Orinoco by Alex and the crew from International Geographic. Recently it's occurred to me that it could be fun to use it as a cultural connector to explore songs as well. Here's a brief list I thought of.

1. What's the distance between Ciudad Nueva and San Pedro de Macorís? How many baseball fields can you see in a quick flyover of San Pedro? La llave de mi corazón, Juan Luis Guerra

2. Where/what size is Medellín relative to Bogotá? Lo que me gusta a mí, Juanes

3. Track the lover's search from Guaynabo to Aguadilla to El Cabo to Miami in No me hagas sufrir, Manny Manuel

4. Have a whirlwind tour of the planet tracking another lover's search in La Travesía, Juan Luis Guerra

Be careful, I promise it's addictive!

Correction on Pin Pon in Shrek

I blogged about the brilliant use of Pin Pon in the Shrek film (to replace the culturally irrelevant reference to the Muffin Man) here. But since then it appears that video has been removed. The clip is currently available here. (As an added correction I should mention that the tale is actually from a Chilean children's program--not Puerto Rican.) Enjoy!

We must not ignore the Paz Sin Fronteras (video)

Juanes's Paz Sin Fronteras concert was such a big deal on the world politics scene (he's more deserving of the Nobel PP than Obama, but don't get me started on that, lol) that it would be a shame for a Spanish teacher to pass up the opportunity to encourage world citizens in our classrooms. Here's a videoclip I found on YouTube that's one of the best. It's short, interesting, summative, with incredibly clear audio and IMO the woman's Spanish is uber-comprehensible through most of the video. It almost sounds like she thinks she's talking to language learners!

Keeping your eyes open for gold nuggets

My husband is a bit of a tennis buff and so we were watching the US Open final yesterday and watched Argentinian Juan Martín del Potro defeat Federer in a stunning upset. In the awards ceremony, del Potro gave a short speech in Spanish (at 1 mins 15 sec). I thought, that'd be very interesting to my class--I have a tennis player in my AP class--and I wondered if it would be up on YouTube. Do I love YouTube? Yes I do.

This is authentic audio you could even use in Spanish 1-- he's thanking family members. What Spanish 1 class is complete without a lesson in family words?