Day 2… What do you do?

Well, I used to do all the policies and procedures on day 2, but this year I decided to push that to day 3 and instead spend more time using the language (reviewing or recalling previous knowledge) without the students even realizing that’s what we are doing.  I also want to continue to draw them in with fun since the majority of my classes are an optional course (though most of the students at my school take level 3, they don’t have to to graduate).

We began with our Tapa and then moved on to our snowball fight!  Students receive a small piece of paper and are instructed to write down a random fact about themselves in the target language.  They do NOT write their names on the paper.  We then crumple it up and literally have a “snowball” fight with the paper.  At my school, we have some new collaboration spaces so we invaded one of those for our fight.  At the end of the fight, everyone grabs a paper and we return to class, taking turns reading the slip we have and guessing who wrote it.  After the person is guessed (or has to tell us because we were sooooo wrong) they then introduce themselves and share a little bit more info in the target language before reading the paper they have.  Some students end up with their own paper, so I set it up to where they don’t tell us and pretend they are reading someone else’s.  I participate too and yesterday ended up with my paper in 3 class periods.

This activity can be tweaked to adjust to different topics in any language.  One of my favorite ways to use it is with if-clauses.  I have the students write one half of the if-clause, have the fight, then when they read the slip they ended up with, they must complete the sentence.  It’s tricky but more fun than completing a worksheet I’d create :).