El Ministerio del Tiempo is a fantastic telenovela that mixes past and present. I am considering using this show in AP Spanish but need to spend more time developing resources and collaborating with others. Anyone? Anyone? :)

I love this show for a variety of reasons. It provides listeners/viewers with a very distinct pattern and rhythm of Spanish...including the 'vos' form that used to be used in Spain, back in the day. Check out this article that I found very intriguing on that topic.

Thematically and culturally this show is a goldmine for Spanish teachers. The three patrol members go back in time to prevent history from changing...and along the way meet very influential historical figures.  It hits on several AP Themes, especially across the episodes. Personal & Public Identities are addressed often throughout the show as the patrol members learn to cope with their new realities and as they work to preserve the rich Spanish patrimony. Beauty & Aesthetics comes up in many episodes as very famous artists play very significant roles, including Miguel Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Pablo Picasso and reoccurring Velazquez. Science & Technology and Contemporary Life are definitely touched upon as the patrol members go back and forth through time- obviously noting technological advancements in present day. 

I hope to find more teachers willing to collaborate and spend time developing resources for this awesome program. For now, I bring you a synopsis, character profiles, a little bit of vocabulary and some beautiful screenshots and images mostly taken from www.rtve.es/television/ministerio-del-tiempo/. 

Google Slides: El ministerio del tiempo; a conocer los personajes

If you haven't seen Velvet yet you need to stop reading this, binge-watch it, and come back to this later. SERIOUSLY. It is to die for. Love. Love. Looooove. And yes, it's on Netflix!

​Okay- so I used this show as a carrot and as a reward for my Spanish 2 students this year at the end of our Fashion & Design Unit. See this post about how I've used Class Dojo in my class to establish community and create a healthy competition in my classes. The "reward" during the Fashion & Design unit was watching Velvet. I knew that I wanted them to watch it anyways but this way they thought they were earning something... :)

Velvet takes place in 1950's Spain, in a prestigious fashion house. While the main characters are so easy to love, the supporting characters are even more enchanting. While this year I only showed one episode- hoping they would continue to watch more of it on their own outside of class- I am considering showing several episodes next year during the duration of the unit...or throughout the semester? The good news is that for die-hard Velvet fans, they are still in the process of making/airing season 2 of the spin-off show Velvet Colección. Don't miss that one either!

Attached are the pre-viewing synopsis and character development work my students completed before viewing episode 1 this year. Here is the Google Slides that I used to show the trailer and accompany the worksheets. Stay tuned for chapter resources this year! Do you have any resources for Velvet you'd like to share? Let's collaborate! 

THEME: Beauty & Aesthetics 
Context: Fashion & Design
Okay, I did it! I took an AP Context and made it my unit of study...and I loved it! This past year in Level 2 I taught a unit called Fashion & Design. I knew that students already had a base knowledge of clothing vocabulary but I wanted them to take their language further and actually make it communicative and cultural for them.  

Included below are a few different authentic resources I used throughout the unit:

1. ZARA- TIENDAS DE MODA ESPAÑOLA: 
To make this resource more comprehensible to students I broke it up into 4 sections and we completed one section each day. This helped scaffold the reading, build anticipation for some, and provided an opportunity to not focus solely on this reading for an entire class period or more. I love completing several activities within one hour, and keeping my students guessing at what is coming next.  Plus, several students had never heard of Zara before- what a cultural giant!
 
2. Diferencias del español. Ropa. #smart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC33c3FPKv0 
I love this video! I love hearing the differences in the language across countries. I'm not convinced I love the activity I created to go along with it but we live and we learn! This wasn't a super TL filled-conversation with my students but it was engaging and culturally interesting nontheless. If you have an idea of how to use this video in class, please let me know! 

3. Fashion & Design: Interpretive Listening (Audio-lingua)
These audio clips have been compiled as an interpretive listening assessment, mostly related to clothing vocabulary. We simply used these as in-class listening practice. 

Lastly, I loved using the Zachary Jones LookBook activities as a way to engage my students with more relevant vocabulary during the unit: músculosa, crop top, joggers, zapatillas, botines, etc. Check out these Google Slides to see how I took screenshots of the worksheet, added them to the slides and made it viewable for the whole class. One thing about all of these resources to keep in mind is that it isn't just about passing out a worksheet to the students, it is about using the resources as a vehicle for communication in your class. 

​Also included in these Google Slides are many more resources, slides, infographics, photos and videos that could be used in this unit, depending on the level and background knowledge of your students. You can see examples of how I use Newspaper headlines to open class, "Who wore it better?" photos as communicative-attention grabbing photo-talk activities, and screenshots of authentic websites to engage students in reading/talking. These slides are a bit disorganized but maybe they will serve someone! 

AP THEME: Beauty & Aesthetics/Contemporary Life
CONTEXT: Visual & Performing Arts/Lifestyles
This past year I needed a fun, engaging unit to wrap up the year with my Spanish 2 students. I was inspired by the Creative Language Classroom to teach a unit on Street/Urban art. Here are some resources that accompanied this unit at the end of the school year:

1. ¿Qué es el arte urbano?- This was a formative interpretive reading assessment we read in class to get students comfortable with some new vocabulary and introduce the new unit to them. This article came from a significantly larger article but it was modified for length to be more manageable for my Spanish 2 students.

2. ¿Cómo elegir mi nombre artístico?- After introducing the unit, working with vocabulary a little bit and looking at several examples of street art, I wanted students to have the opportunity to get a little creative. We used this article to discuss graffiti 'tags' and artistic names. I modified this article so that it would print cleaner. Sometimes formatting can mean the world of difference when it comes to being comprehensible to students! I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this article so the accompanying questions were used as a quick whole-class comprehension check and then we spent the rest of the class seeing who could come up with the most artistic tag!

3. Arte Urbano- This was the summative interpretive reading assessment that I used with my students after about two weeks of thoroughly diving into street art around the world. Although long, this assessment left students feeling successful at the end of the year because vocabulary and content were scaffolded along the way to help them comprehend. It is pivotal that the language we provide students throughout our units be comprehensible to prepare them for the tasks/assessments we want them to complete- or that they 'have to' complete.

AP THEME: Beauty and Aesthetics
CONTEXT: Defining Beauty
Sometimes I think that we make more work for ourselves by searching for multiple resources to use in different levels. Instead, we can use the same resource and change the task to fit the level of out students. This helps us manage our time and once we have a great resource, why use it only once? Change the activity and reuse the same resource for the same class - the same resource could be the basis for in-class interpersonal conversation, and interpersonal writing activity using a backchat like TodaysMeet while watching a video. Create an interpretive listening task for the video.

I used Videonot.es to write comments and questions as I watched the video. I was thinking about multiple proficiency levels as I took notes because I wanted to maximize my time. Writing prompts and questions for the Novice level should be in English. Once students reach Intermediate levels, prompts and questions may be written in the target language, but we must specify the language of response for the assessment. 

Angélica Dass, a Brazilian born photographer, has done several TEDx talks about her project, Humanae. Humanea is a project that addresses skin tone, art, personal identity, self-esteem, and perceptions of beauty. It is truly an amazing project. Using one of her TEDx talks, I developed two tasks - one for Novice learners and one for Intermediate learners. The theme of this video is more challenging, but with questions at a different level, I believe it is also accessible to lower level students as well. While viewing with students the teacher may need to pause at different times throughout the viewing to give students a chance to answer and ask questions. 

AP THEME: Beauty and Aesthetics
CONTEXT: Visual and Performing Arts
During a unit on Entertainment and Media in Level 2, I was striving to make vocabulary assessment more meaningful (I didn't want to just give them a rote memorization quiz). I thought about how they would use the vocabulary, adjectives to describe movies, in real life, and decided the most authentic use of this set of vocabulary would be done when looking at movies and which movies you would like to see/not see after reading about the movie. I developed an Interpretive Reading activity for students using movie synopses. The vocabulary is given to them, but they have to use a variety of the vocabulary correctly in context to talk about their thoughts on the movies. After students completed the activity we watched the trailers to each of the movies - we did this after and not before because I wanted students to base their vocabulary use on what they were reading, not viewing.