A high-interest exercise for imperfect/pasado continuo

In my class, my students know that I don't care if they know what imperfect or preterite means. Often we call them descriptive past and sudden past, because that's the best way in my opinion to contrast them.  The trick with putting them together is to get students to use one when they're describing ongoing action and switch to the other when they want to say what happened.  We do a story, where they fill in the details, in which our two characters were going somewhere (a birthday party for the horse's mother) in some way (on an airplane) doing something (eating chocolate straws) with someone else doing something (Miley Cyrus not wearing enough clothing) when something happens (the plane fell) and while that was happening other things happened (the people screamed, the horse pushed Miley Cyrus out of the plane).

I thought about using children's books as a follow-up exercise, having them describe what was happening on the page.  I did that very quickly at the end of a class, as an oral activity, and I pushed them to make the exercise very rapid so they didn't have time to get bored, but I thought, if I do this again they're going to get bored with it as a writing exercise.  But it's almost March Madness.  We live in KY where basketball is king. I have 2 girls who will probably have a volleyball scholarship in college.  I've been hyping up the upcoming World Cup. What if I find amazing sports videos, culturally relevant, in Spanish, to use instead?

So these are what we found.  Manu Ginobli, the most accomplished Latin American basketball player ever, beats Serbia & Montenegro at the buzzer in the 2004 Olympics (make sure your students watch the clock & the score box).  The USA scores on a fabulous corner kick in a World Cup qualifier vs. Mexico. Peru's volleyball team makes an amazing play in their bid for a spot in the 2010 World Championship games in Japan after their star actually kicks the ball--I didn't even know that was legal.

We watched the videos through, used sudden past to say what happened in the big moment of the game, and then paused the video in different areas.  We named some random person on the screen, and each student had to use the continuous past (our focus of the week) to say qué estaba haciendo esa persona. We did this 3 or 4 times for each video and I took the writing as a daily grade. It worked beautifully.  My students could have watched the videos a dozen times so they didn't even care that they were technically doing a grammar writing exercise.

Here are the videos:

Pan's Labyrinth, without subtitles (imperfect vs. preterite)

I found the intro to Pan's Labyrinth on YouTube, without subtitles! I'm totally against showing subtitled videos in class--if I can't concentrate on the Spanish audio, I know my students can't. But I love the intro to this movie, because it's such a good example of imperfect vs. preterite--this is what things used to be like when the girl lived in the under world, but then 'one day'... and every verb after that is preterite. Anything that can make the distinction clearer is a gem.

I'm pretty sure all the movies uploaded on YouTube in their entirety are big violations of copyright, but I consider this like the 'short portion for educational purposes' exception in print copyright law. I only show it up to the point where the girl escapes to the real world. And then I encourage my students to see the film... if their parents will okay it and agree with me that though it's rated R, the linguistic and historical significance outweigh the war-related violence (though I will say the torture scene is a bit much for me).