Happy (almost) Thanksgiving! I’m in Louisiana visiting my dad and brother for the holiday. I flew in day before yesterday from Nashville after the American Council of Teachers of Foreign Language 2017 Conference. Oh. My. Gosh. What a cool weekend of learning and networking with other educators! #teachernerd Highlights: won a classroom set of TPRS books from Fluency Matters and got to learn some Swedish in an OWL circle. Still processing it all and I’ll write about it soon! My dad’s also a teacher (high school U.S. history and geography), and we were “talking shop” about classroom stuff when I realized how great Quizlet Diagrams would be for his geography students. Luckily, they’re one-to-one with Chromebooks, so taking advantage of Quizlet will be even easier. Quizlet's already been a lifesaver for me and my students, and I will talk your ear off about how great it would be for you and your students, too! But today I'll just tell you about how I've started using Quizlet Diagrams. 😆 In my own classroom, at the beginning of each unit, we look at a map of the region or country we’re going to be studying. I create a simple blank map handout for students to label while I project and label the same image on the whiteboard. This is all in the target language, and I got the idea from another blog post that I can’t find this far from my desk. When I’m back in the classroom, I’ll update this post! UPDATE: Found it! "Teaching Basic Geography in the TL" from Elizabeth Dentlinger. Thanks, Elizabeth! Then, I upload the same map to Quizlet Diagrams and label the 15 or so terms we’ve labeled as a class. Now we can play all the games they love on Quizlet, but using the map we’re studying! I’ve tried it twice so far and it’s worked great. Seniors in IB Year 2 were learning basic geography of Bolivia before watching También la lluvia (Even the Rain) and one student kept mis-labeling Brazil. His teammates, very gently, reminded him, "Brasil es muy grande..." (Brazil is very big...). LOL You do have to be careful that what you’re labeling is distinct and obvious when highlighted by itself on a map. For example, as a student I might memorize that Cobija is north of La Paz, but when we’re playing Quizlet Live with a diagram, only Cobija’s spot will be highlighted and I can’t use my reference point. Still, a thumbs up/thumbs down vote after playing the game revealed a positive review from the chicos! They like it. 👍 We also play a geography game that I’ve been calling ¿Dónde está? (Where is it?) that I found at MrDonn.org after some Googling. Students in teams create clues that get progressively easier, all leading to a point on a map. Teams read their clues to other teams that have to guess, and the harder the clue, the more points they can earn. This game is great because you can use any map, though it’s been good review for an assessment to use the map we’re studying. Check out my TpT page for a handout for students to play the game in Spanish class!
P.S. I love maps so much (just a quick count from memory: I think I have 5 up in my classroom permanently) that two years ago the senior prank in my room involved pretending to throw all my maps in the trash. 😆
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AuthorSC native, Salvadoran at heart, Spanish teacher, trivia nerd, and novice blogger. Archives
January 2018
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