I did a fun activity using Kahoot and Padlet to encourage comprehension in the target language. I love Kahoot, an educational response system, because it creates excitement and passion while students are learning the fundamentals of language. However, when you get down to it, really the students are just memorizing information when they play. Students aren't really using higher order thinking skills. It really is just a gamified multiple choice test. So, my thought was, How can I take Kahoot, a fun educational response system that the students love, and step this lesson UP a notch?! A lesson where the students are comprehending, reading, and speaking in the target language but still incorporating Kahoot?
The lightbulb, or el bombillo, went off while blowdrying my hair today. This is how it went:
1. We are working on present tense e-ie, o-ue, and e-i stem-changing verbs with food vocabulary. To help with the memorization/repetition portion that we sometimes just have to do as language teachers, we played Kahoot. The questions were simple. The questions would say things like, ¿Cómo se dice "we eat lunch" en español?
The lightbulb, or el bombillo, went off while blowdrying my hair today. This is how it went:
1. We are working on present tense e-ie, o-ue, and e-i stem-changing verbs with food vocabulary. To help with the memorization/repetition portion that we sometimes just have to do as language teachers, we played Kahoot. The questions were simple. The questions would say things like, ¿Cómo se dice "we eat lunch" en español?
Then, each student had a sentence. When each sentence was put together as a class, it told a story. The story was about my friend, Cecilia and I. We went to the Mexican restaurant, order drinks, lunch, dessert ,talked, and left. Simple enough for novice Spanish learners. Each student wrote their sentences on a dry erase board. After we focused on the meat of the sentence (the verb) while playing Kahoot, we expanded on the idea and each student said, their sentence, in Spanish, The sentences in English are below.
3. I liked this activity because the students were the participants too. They were essentially helping me write the story. I would repeat the information in Spanish and ask comprehension questions along the way. I would say things like ¿Qué va a beber? ¿Quién va a comer el arroz con leche? ¿Cómo se sienten? After we got done writing our sentences, students had a choice. They could take a selfie with their board or they could write on our class padlet. Here's the padlet:
Our sentences tell a story! It was cool to see the whole lesson come together. Then, their homework was to answer comprehension questions over the story that started out as a simple Kahoot game. Stuents could rely on the class padlet for comprehension. Essentially, they are relying on eachother, not me for the correct answer. Love that we can use Kahoot for simple memorization tasks, but now, we just stepped it up a notch! Throughout the lesson, students were engaged and speaking, reading, writing, and comprehending in Spanish with little prompting from me. So much better than a worksheet!