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:

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!

Camila's new single: "Mientes" (release date 11/24!)

My students are insanely excited about the release of Camila's sophomore album. Several of them can sing "Solo para ti" or "Coleccionista de canciones" or "Abrázame" from memory. The first single from the album, "Mientes," will be released next week on the 24th. Meanwhile, you can hear the whole amazing song on their YouTube channel here. It sounds great, and looks like it will be good for yo-form preterites from er/ir verbs and for all present tú forms. Enjoy!

Songs for the elusive 3rd pers. sing. preterite

Certain things are super easy to find songs for. Reflexives. Present tense, particularly yo y tú. Preterite yo y tú. That's about all love songs do, right? Talk about you and me in the past, lol. But the other day my colleague asked if I knew of any songs for 3rd-person preterite, and that was tough. I went through my whole lyrics file (which I'll email to you if you DM me @wandermami on twitter) and I did find two songs. The first I don't recommend for below Spanish 3. The song is Mojado by Ricardo Arjona. It's very politically charged and full of the poetic layers of meaning typical of Arjona. Please note that videos on YouTube were not uploaded by SonyBMG--I'll keep my eyes out for that one.

But my colleague teaches Spanish 1 and 2 so my quest continued. I did finally come across a good one--Arroyito by Fonseca. It has 9 occurrences of 3rd person preterite, 7 of them unique. And it's a good song by a good guy with a good video with no copyright problems.

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).