Higher or lower is a great and easy game that probably takes 5-6 minutes to play. All that you need is a deck of cards. You will have the cards in a stack on a table in front of you or hold them in your hand. You will show the top card (face up) and the student has to guess higher or lower (Ace is always low and king is always high. If a student guesses and it happens to be the same value card when you flip that you just showed them, then you flip one additional card. ie. They are looking at a jack and you flip over a jack, you then just flip another card.) You either line students up and walk down the line to each of them to have them make their guess or you can have them move around you in a circle and come to you as they pass by for their guess. As they get out, they go back to their seat to sit. Last one in the game wins.
I have not had problems with the kids who are out not remaining involved. They are usually competitively supporting someone who is still in the game and cheering each other on. They get very excited!
ENJOY,

There are many ways to teach emotions and feelings, but I love songs. I love making up silly songs to help me remember things, I love singing them, I love coming up with gestures for them and I love the energy that they can bring to my classroom. I use them to teach, but I use them at carefully timed moments to serve as a brain break. It is a great opportunity to blow off some steam, be silly AND to practice useful vocabulary.

The song ¿Cómo estás tú? goes to the tune of That’s not my name by the Ting Tings....great song 😂 but even better as ¿Cómo estás tú?

​Here is a link to the video with the music that I play in class and we sing along to it and do gestures. the second video is of me singing and doing the gestures that we use in class.

My classroom requests song is, by far, one of my students’ all-time favorites. This is my major TPR load for them in the first several weeks of school. We gradually learn them and what they mean and the gestures that go along with them over a couple days in class and then I do the big song unveil....This is the first song that I do with them and it introduces the opportunity for them to see that silly is ok and we can still learn while we are having fun. I am including the PDF of the lyrics (I prefer using tú commands, but I also have one with ustedes commands. Feel free to reach out if you would like a copy of that.) a video of one class singing it and another video of me going slowly through the song and doing the gestures. The song goes to the tune of Take me out to the ballgame.
I hope you can use it. Enjoy! 

As a CI teacher, we are supposed to shelter vocabulary, but I do tend to do vocabulary dumps with songs that we sing regularly in my classroom. They are received with great enthusiasm by my students and I consider them a brainbreak that just keeps on giving!

We do calendar talk every day in my class and that always includes the weather. Calendar talk is generally fast, but for the first month or so, after we do the day and the date, we quickly get up and sing what is always a classroom favorite, “EL TIEMPO.” It is silly and I consider it a brain break.

The song goes to the tune of “she’ll be comin round the mountain.” I always project this pdf (below) on my screen as we sing and then as we talk about the day’s weather afterwards. I will also include a YouTube video of me doing the song with the gestures that we do when we sing it.

​i hope you enjoy it and can make use of it with your classes!
​

Cara o Cruz means heads or tails in Spanish and is a great quick brain break that can be done in one minute ... or more if your students love it and want a few rounds.

The teacher has a coin and students stand. They are instructed to choose either cara (grabbing their head) or Cruz (grabbing their bum). Teacher tosses the coin. Whoever chose the correct side of the coin will remain standing and whoever was wrong will sit. The teacher continues to toss the coin until one person remains. I usually give out a candy to the winner. It is possible for no one to win, but I usually insist that when we get down to two people they must choose opposite sides of the coin.

My kids love this and I love it because it is so easy and it is super fast with no set up. I hope you enjoy it!

So, you just can’t get enough of your bitmoji....I can’t either!😂 I saw Meredith White post that she made stickers of her bitmoji the other day and I am simply copying her and going to write up how to do it. Now, there are all sizes of printable stickers available. You could print small stickers to put on papers you are handing u could do them as labels for any number of things, but you can also buy full sheet stickers!😳 OH. MY. GOODNESS!!!!
Most importantly, you need to get the stickers. The brand that seems to be the most readily available is AVERY. There are a bazillion different styles and you can decide what you want based upon what you want to do, but if you want to do the full sheet large stickers, this is the exact product description:
Avery Matte Frosted Clear Full Sheet Labels for Inkjet Printers, 8.5" x 11", 25 Labels (8665).

I purchased a package of 25 for approximately $16 through amazon prime. They work in most printers. I used our good color printer at school.
1. AVERY has an app that you can download to help with their products and printing. Download that.
2. Go to the bitmoji app and find the bitmoji pics you want to use as stickers save those to your camera roll

**NOTE** If you want your bitmojis to be Spanish, then you need to go to the settings on your phone (iPhone) GENERAL - LANGUAGE AND REGION - SPANISH

3. Go back to the AVERY app and input your sticker type # in the quick search (it is on the package) You can see that mine from above are 8665.
4. It asks you to select your design and you should choose BLANK.
5. Continue and find the picture icon on the toolbar on the left of your new project. Select the picture that you want to be your sticker.
6. Size it to fill your page.
7. Hit the preview button.
8. Hit the print button. It will ask you if you want to save the project before you print. I don’t. It will generate a PDF when you say no and then prompt you to open the pdf high it will do in a web browser and you can print.

I actually created the PDF at home and my printer wasn’t working. So I emailed the PDF link to myself and printed them later at school.

My students think they are hysterical! I hope you have some fun with them too!!

This game falls under the no outbut, quick brain break category. This is quick, easy and fun! This takes max 2minutes to play a round once students know how it is played.

1. Students put their DOMINANT HAND on top of their head (this makes the shape of a banana....the name of the game.) so, if they are left handed they put left hand on head, right handed right hand goes on head..
2. Have students spread out as much as possible. *Note: I play this in a deskless classroom.
   
3. When you say go EVERYONE IS IT! 🤪 kids tag each other with the hand that is not on their head.
4. The last one in is the winner.
5. I tell students that if they tag hands with another student, no one is out and it is a do-over.

I was following a post on the iflt facebook page about creating a madlibs sort of story that students could fill in the details for and how to go about doing it without creating more work than it was worth for myself. Why even do this? It would just be a different way to collect ideas for a story. Introducing a little bit of novelty. This isn't a new idea, as I have seen these before on spanish411.net. I like the idea, though, of creating a very generic madlib story that can be used over and over again with classes by adding different answers each time you use it.
The only difficult part is working out the story so that the pieces added won't change the grammatical correctness of the story skeleton...masculine/feminine, contractions, etc...
I finally got a story skeleton to a place that I was happy enough to risk throwing it at a class and introduced it this week. It was great fun and we will work with the story that we created over several days looking at the story from different points of view, adding in dialogue and actors. I also made the story a bit of a mystery so that we can speculate and take the story farther if it has enough momentum.
So, here is how I went about making the flippity madlib.
First I sketched out the story. I kept all dialogue out so that we could just play with that in class.
Second, you go to flippity.net   If you have never seen flippity and all that you can do, check it out, because there are a bunch of easy to make activities! Here are the ones you can choose from:

The one we are interested in is all the way at the bottom on the left. If you take notice, each square has three options: Demo, Instructions and Template. Try out the demo and see how it works. When I started, at least the first few times, I kept the instructions open on one tab and then opened another tab for the template so that you can go back and forth to make sure you are doing everything correctly.

When you select template, this screen, as seen below, will appear prompting you to make a copy that will be saved to your google drive. Make sure you rename your copy so that you can keep everything organized in your drive!

Here are two pictures of what your copy will look like. It is a spreadsheet. These examples already have stories in them that I am working on. I simply replaced their story with mine. The blanks that you have for the story are set by brackets [put information between the brackets that you want students to be prompted to input]. ie [animal o objeto include el/la] or [un color]
Change the story title in the top white box.
Click in the box that has the story and it will isolate that box and give you a bigger space to work in.

Once you have completed your story, you need to publish your sheet to the web. See picture below: File - publish to web - publish and then close that box.

You are now ready to get the link for your story. At the bottom of the spreadsheet on the left side is a tab that says "get the link". Select that tab and you will go to another page on the spreadsheet where you will see the link and can open it or copy it. If you are like me and continue to see things that you would like to change in your story, you can go back and republish, but my experience has been that, by default, it is set to automatically republish any changes made. Once you have the link you can share it anywhere you would like. I have mine posted on my website under class activities for my students.

When you follow the link to your story, you will be brought to the page to input the information for the story.

Once the information is all entered into the blanks, there is a button at the bottom that says, "Show me my story". You can always go back to the original page where you entered the information once you see the story if you need to make any corrections. Here are 3 samples from our first go around with it.

Here is a link to my class activities page where I have a link to the two stories I have created so far: El Problema and No tengo
https://dmsspanish.weebly.com/class-activities.html

I have several ideas for using this in class and haven't done more than a class created story yet, but I envision small groups creating stories from the same template and sharing in a variety of ways. If you notice, the "el Problema" story focuses on most of the irregular present tense verbs. So, having multiple versions of the story with the same verbs gets a lot of meaningful and funny repetition.  I also took the stories that we created above and plugged them into textivate and made a sequence.

A few weeks, ago my daughter came to me to show me a movie trailer she had started making about our family. I had seen trailers that people had made before, but they looked so good that I was certain it was beyond me. When I saw my 11 year old daughter’s, I decided that it must not be as complicated as I had thought and found some time to check it out.

As it turns out, it is REALLY EASY and QUITE FUN! iMovie does all of the hard work. All that you need to do is bring pictures and short video clips that you like. It walks you through the process step by step.

When you open iMovie, you select the plus sign to create a new project and these 2 options present themselves. You can use the movie option to put video clips together for movie projects, but I prefer the apps splice and clips for those types of projects. The option we want to focus on is trailer.

Once you select the trailer button, you will be shown all of the theme options for your trailer. You can watch a sample with each theme to decide which one works for you. The music will be exactly what you hear in the sample, but everything else can change.

Once you select the theme you like, you select the create button at the top right of the screen and then you will jump right into the process. There are two parts to the creation of the trailer. First, you create the outline. Here is where you name your movie, cast, name your studio (soooo fun!), and add all of your credits. You will notice that different themes allow you to name different numbers of characters. So, depending on what you are trying to accomplish and how you want to approach it, that may have a greater influence on which theme you choose. Also, I have used multiple students/characters as one character in the cast....that is one way to work around a limited number of cast member options.

The majority of the work comes in the second part of creation, on the storyboard. This is where you will select all of your photos and video clips. You will be prompted to choose action shots or closeups, medium distance or wide shots, group shots, etc. They will also ask for the text portions that will be smattered throughout the trailer. You can work from your camera roll. It will separate photos and videos. So, when looking for a video, you will have to switch to the movie icon at the bottom of the page to see your available movie clips and then, of course, will need to switch back again to see photos. You will see all of your albums. I found it easier to create an album with all of my photos for the project and that way have one central location to go back and forth between photos and videos. It made the process easier and quicker for me.

 You can check out your process at any point and play back whatever you have created to that point. Sometimes, you will need to go back and adjust the photos by zooming in or out or how the trailer pans over the photo. All of that is very easy to do. You just select the picture from the storyboard and you will be able to pinch to zoom in or do the opposite to zoom out and can slide the photo up/down or left/right to adjust where they start to pan across the photo. Once you have the trailer completed, you can save it to your camera roll or share it to social media or YouTube.

So, what will you use this neat little tool for? I made one as a psych-up for a movie making project for El Capibara Con Botas. I have also made one to represent myself and my teaching style. I imagine that I could make a trailer following a one word image and story, using student storyboards and illustrations. It is certainly something students could easily create and would be a fun project. I am including below the two that I have currently completed. As I finish them I share them on my YouTube channel on my teaching videos playlist.

I hope this is a fun addition to your bag of teaching tricks!

We have a routine in my class. It is a basic skeleton for class that we follow. Part of that routine is that on Fridays we talk about what we are going to do on the weekend and on Mondays we talk about what we did on the weekend. Here we are midway through another year and once again the song and dance is not as exciting for them as it once was. I vary it, sometimes we interview a student and class conversation builds from that; sometimes I put questions on socrative and we compare answers as if it were a survey; sometimes the questions are on a ppt. But I have come up with something new to spice up our weekend talk! I call it “Las Aventuras de Michimacho” (my students call me Michimacho) and it’s all about ME injecting my bitmoji into their weekend activities.
On Friday we discuss what adventures they think Mrs. Marshall is going to have. Where is she going to go? Who is she going to see? Talk to? Etc....In the midst of this discussion I also ask about what they are going to do. Over the weekend, I locate pictures of a couple students doing activities. Sometimes they send them to me, or I can ask a parent or I lurk around on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Then comes the most fun part of all...SNAPCHAT STICKERS!

1.Once you have the photo(s) that you want. Open Snapchat.

2.If you have a bitmoji, you can link it to your Snapchat account if you haven’t already.

3.Now, select the camera roll button in Snapchat and select your picture.

4.Select the three buttons in the corner for editing options.

5.Select EDIT PHOTO.

6.Select the square sticker icon to see all of the available stickers.

7.Make sure to check out all of the icons at the bottom, because they are divided into categories.

8.Select the sticker you want to use and it will drop into your picture. You can move, turn and resize it. If you don't like it, you can drag it over the garbage can and it will disappear. You can also add writing or text with the pencil or T icons.

9.Select DONE and then choose the appropriate option for saving your image, either save and replace or save as copy. The image will be saved to your camera roll.

Once you play with this a few times it is really very easy to do. I even do it on the fly in class with success. It is fun and it is funny. Humor is supposed to be the best medicine and it can surely cure some middle of the year "I don't feel like it" blues! Monday morning brings a bit of excitement and anticipation, because the kids want to know where in the world that crazy Spanish teacher went this weekend and which students will be the victims of her emoji photobombs.

This weekend was a busy one...