I recently finished my first attempt at teaching high school. I began in mid-February as a long-term sub for three Spanish 1 classes on block scheduling. As all of my prior teaching experience was at the university level, boy did I have a lot to learn! I am appreciative for the learning experience for so many reasons, one being that it really challenged me to diversify my lesson formats. I am thankful for the wonderful community of Spanish teachers/bloggers on the internet as well as my colleagues and professors who shared materials with me and gave me ideas for new lesson styles.

The lesson in this blog post was one of the best days in my high school classroom! It includes a read-along story, ¡Vamos al restaurante!, to be presented on the board as well as a handout for students to follow along with.

The story takes place in Mexico City, and I chose the restaurant Café de Tacuba because it was my favorite place to eat when I was in D.F. I was attempting to incorporate something authentic while also covering the target vocabulary from the textbook (Avancemos). The presentation includes pictures of this beautiful stop in the historical center in D.F. and concludes with a video of the musicians who fill the restaurant with string serenades.

Topics covered include:

• review of food vocabulary (based on Avancemos textbook)
• introduction of family vocabulary
• practice with verb conjugation, focus on -er/-ir
• review of question words (in follow-up reading comprehension activity)

One goal of this lesson was to segue from food vocabulary to family vocabulary, and I was so proud of my students who really rose to the challenge and read along with me for the whole story! The pictures, simple as they may be, provided just the right amount of scaffolding for them to incorporate the new vocabulary. The cloze activity served as a reference for them to use while answering the reading comprehension questions as well as a study guide. We went back and read it a few times because it really seemed to boost the students´confidence to be able to read a whole story in Spanish! The success of this lesson really got me interested in learning more about the TPRS method (Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Story-Telling). (I´m not sure if this lesson is exactly TPRS because I still need to learn more about it! If you have any favorite TPRS resources please comment below!)

You can view the presentation below (made on Google Drive). You can advance with the arrow keys or by a click.  Here is a link to the handout that I used: ¡Vamos al restaurante! handout (PDF)

As always, keep the comments coming! I love connecting with other Spanish teachers online!