Spanish Lesson Plan with News Items

by Ann Abbott


It's the time of the semester when we all need to interject a little variety in our classes to keep students alert and engaged.

Today I'll be doing parts of Lección 15 ¨¿Son noticias para nosotros?¨ from Comunidades. I gathered a few articles from today's La Raza  (a Spanish-language newspaper based in Chicago). I copied them, divided them in half and printed them out. In class, I'll mix them out and hand each student a piece of paper. Students will read their half of the news item and then search among their classmates to find the person who has the other half. They'll sit down together to fill in the complete picture. You can print out the articles I chose and do this activity with your students, too. (I have enough for 14 students. If you have more, just choose a few more articles or pair students up.)

Afterwards, I'll have students do the following:

  • Circulate among their classmates again, telling about their article and asking if the other students already knew about this news item or not. (Conclusion: usually the "Latino news" are completely unknown to most students.)
  • Ask them to identify why they think these particular news items are pertinent to their work in the community or connected to information we have studied in class.
  • Get out their smart phones or laptops and browse La Raza for a few minutes. Then go to La Opinion (a Los Angeles based Spanish-language newspaper) to compare the two perspectives.
  • To conclude, I will ask students to answer our lesson's initial question: ¿Son noticias para nosotros?
I hope that you can use these articles with your students. If you do, let me know how it goes. I find that it is both a fun and informative lesson.

Comments

  1. YvesSeptember 19, 2013 at 1:46 AM

    Hi there, What do you think of the following idea of lesson plan? http://www.espanico.com/home/news-lesson-plans/

    ReplyDelete

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