Embedded Reading: La Lista by Aldrey

After creating this embedded reading for La historia de Juan by Juanes for my high school Spanish 2 students, I decided to try to do something similar for my 7th grade students.  This is their first year of Spanish.  I only see them every other day, so even though it was November when I used this with them, they had only had about 25 days of class time.  This was a perfect activity to do leading up to Thanksgiving, since it was a short week (2.5 days).  I probably spent a total of 3 class days (80 minute blocks) on this song.

I did have to give the students a lot of vocabulary up front, and it may not have all been comprehensible.  But it gave them the resources to make each reading comprehensible.  I shared the document with students through Google Classroom, so they could do it online.  Some still prefer paper.  The online version gave them the active links to read a little about Aldrey and watch the videos.  You can find the packet here.

We went slowly, allowing them plenty of time to read each version, do the associated assignment, and then review as a class.  After doing all of the versions, we finally listened to the song, while they tried to fill in the blanks. I didn't show the video at this point, only listened.  This assured that their focus would be on listening.  We listened to the whole song through once.  Second time, I paused every once in a while to make sure all were still following along in the right spots.  The third time we listened, I paused after each blank (or maybe a couple depending on flow of song), and together we reviewed the missing words.

I really felt that students had a good understanding of the lyrics by the time we actually watched the video.  I had them sing along as we watched.  We watched this video, with the lyrics in it the first few times.

The next day we watched this video, which is more story-like and matches the lyrics.  Then I asked "¿Cuál video prefieres?  ¿Por qué?" While they could understand these Spanish questions, most did have to answer in English because their Spanish isn't very far along yet.

As an extension activity, students wrote their own "listas".  They wrote goals for Spanish class, the school year, and life in general.  Then, they took 1 from each list and created a poster.  Students illustrated their goals so that other students could understand what they were.  I asked them to write them in Spanish, but let them figure it out on their own, so some were very hard to comprehend!  I didn't grade these, just let them write and draw.  They presented the poster to their partner, and partner had to guess the English based on the picture.

Overall I enjoyed doing this with them, and I think the students enjoyed it too - I still hear them singing it occasionally in class!