Teaching Spanish: Family Unit
Learning to talk about family is done in nearly every Spanish 1 class. I have compiled a collection of some of my favorite activities to teaching the family in Spanish.
Day One. I’d like to introduce the concept of family with this PowerPoint, telling the story of the family. I then love to share Barbara McArthur’s Tengo Una Familia Grande.
We then create a list of the basic family members and we do a little dress up. This one is really fun and you’ll need some prompts. I suggest a tie to be the father, a wig or a cane or reading glasses to play one of the grandparents, some toys to represent brothers, sisters, babies, a bottle or a baby doll.
The students all close their eyes and we call someone up and I “dress them up” as that family member. From their new list, the students have to guess who it is. We always have so much fun.
I then give them the puzzles and they work on building their family vocabulary from there.
Day Two. I print out the story and present the immersive family tree story. Printing out the story, I build the family tree as you see in the script, talking about who is related to who. The students then do their family tree.
Day Three. We do the family riddles, which are essentially teaching them how to use circumlocution, talking about family in other words.
They then do the family dramatization. This is one of my very favorites where you use it to form little families, and each person in a group of five or six plays a different member of the family. Their job is to introduce every other person and how they’re related to them to the rest of the class. Again, if you’ve got props, it’s great fun to dress up.
The unit ends with either and/or royal family hot seat, where you take some basic questions (maybe no more than five). Each person has to play a member of the Spanish Royal Family or one of, another famous person from the Spanish-speaking world. They go in the hot seat and answer all of their questions.
Looking for a set of ready-made materials? https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Spanish-Family-Unit-2278349
Looking for more ideas for teaching Spanish? http://reallifelanguage.com/reallifelanguageblog/2015/09/11/world-language-class-activities/