One of the areas of teaching Spanish with comprehensible input where I struggle is the idea that almost everything we teach is in the third person.
โ There was a girl. She was smart and interesting. She met a boy. He was also smart and interesting. Then one day, there was a problemโฆโ
Right? This is the outline for most comprehensible input stories.
Students can tell me loads about other people, but they donโt know how to transfer that to talking about themselves. Yet middle school and high school students LOVE talking about themselves! And, in the real world, interpersonal communication requires students to talk about themselves! Therefore, if I want my students to be ready for the real world, how do I incorporate more first-person narrative into my comprehensible input Spanish classroom?
Using Weekend Chat to Teach the Spanish Preterite
While talking this over with my brilliant colleagues Carlos and Valentina, they suggested I introduce weekend chat in Spanish class. Start each Monday class with the question โWhat did you do this weekend?โ
First, I needed to teach a mini unit on Spanish preterite to provide enough repetitions for students to be able to produce it on their own. Because comprehensible input classrooms rarely show students grammar or explicit conjugations, I only showed students several Spanish verbs in the past tense as vocabulary.
We took notes and practiced making statements. Next, we played Quizlet Live with the preterite verbs. This game can be played in person or remotely and gives students natural practice with Spanish past tense conjugations!
Spanish Preterite Speaking Activity: Pretending with Famous People
My students are reluctant to speak. So getting them to spill their guts about their weekend proved a little more challenging than I anticipated.
To spice things up, I gave students pictures of famous people and cartoons and asked them to take the perspective of someone in the photo. By pretending they were someone else, they could more creatively talk about their weekend in the Spanish past tense using preterite verbs.
Students had a lot of fun pretending to be someone else. When I asked them to read their favorite weekend update aloud to the group, they got really excited to act as if they were the character. This quickly became one of my favorite Spanish preterite speaking activities!
More Ways to Practice the Spanish Preterite with Stories
The following day we did a game of running dictation, using a story we previously read about a video-game-playing giraffe. My students are hybrid, so I set up this game on Pear Deck for the virtual students. You can read more about that here.
From there, I provided more repetition and comprehensible input with Spanish past tense verbs by just writing a story each day about my wild life!
In my opinion, students were more engaged with these stories about my life than if I had written about someone else. Even though they knew the stories were ridiculous, they liked making predictions about what happened to me. And all the while they were receiving lots of repetitions of first-person Spanish preterite verbs!
After they listened to my Spanish past tense stories, they re-read and drew what happened to show comprehension. Eventually, I also asked them to write their own stories in the preterite tense and swap with another student to illustrate. This was also a lot of fun!
Student Storytelling with the Spanish Preterite
Lots of teachers tell me they are not creative enough to write their own stories in Spanish. When I say I wrote stories in the past tense (preterite) about my wild life, here are some examples:
I went to Starbucks. I talked to the barista. I drank my coffee. I saw students from our school. I ran away.
I walked to my car. I saw a note. Oh no! Did I get a ticket? I hope I didnโt get a ticket! Phew, I didnโt get a ticket. I read the note. It was from my secret admirer. I went to see my secret admirer. Hooray!
None of these stories are very creative. However, they do use lots of repetitions of Spanish verbs in the past tense (preterite)!
Next Steps: Building a Spanish Preterite Lesson Plan
We spent six days on this Spanish preterite lesson plan, practicing using past tense verbs to talk about our own lives. Students were able to pick up the conjugation pattern, so if I gave them any other random verb, they could conjugate it in the past tense.
After that, I began incorporating this practice every Monday as part of Calendar Talk. Sometimes I ask students to write 2-3 sentences in the past tense about their weekend, and sometimes I have them talk to a neighbor.
This Chat Mat is also a good tool for students to keep in their folders. It helps solve the problem when students say “Bruh, I didn’t do anything this weekend.” When a student tells me “I literally did nothing,” I ask them to talk about a favorite vacation they went on, or some other past event. They just have to talk about something that happened in the past.
This handout is great because it serves as a roadmap for how to keep a conversation going in Spanish. It’s really important to teach students how to ask follow up questions and how to react to their peers. You want to model that speaking is not one-sided. I find it helpful to bring up a stronger student and role play a conversation with them where I ask the follow up questions and react. That way, students can see the expectation.
What other ways do you use to get kids talking about themselves in the Spanish past tense?
