Navigating through a train station in a Spanish speaking country could be a real life task that students may experience. It was also a unit I needed to teach as part of our Spanish curriculum! Here are some activities I developed about trains in Spanish that I hope you find useful as well!
Introducing train vocabulary in Spanish
To introduce the train vocabulary to students, I told students we would be reading a new story. To understand that story, we first needed to learn some new vocabulary about trains in Spanish. Students were asked to write down the words and definitions, and then make a prediction based on those words about the story. I call this predict-a-story. Students really enjoyed the activity because it wasn’t just standard note-taking, and they could be creative.
Next, students shared their own stories with the class and we laughed at everyone’s creativity. This provided us with more repetitions of the train vocabulary in preparation for the story. After all that writing and sitting though, we played a round of the flyswatter game with images of the trains vocabulary.
The Train Story
I wrote this story based on the vocabulary in my textbook about trains in Spanish. I did not tell them the title, but I read the first paragraph aloud to students and then asked them to make predictions. It’s a suspenseful story, so there are lots of good places to pause and practice these reading strategies in Spanish.
I keep the flyswatter slide on the board while I tell the story so that I can point to images of our new train vocabulary as I tell the story. I’m not an artist, so prepping a slide like this saves all of us a lot of time and frustration! I spend about 30 minutes telling students the story before I pass out or show them any text. Once I do pass out the train story, I give students time to re-read with partners and answer the comprehension questions.
For homework, I assign a SmashDoodle activity. I learned about smashdoodle from The Comprehensible Classroom. Basically, students make a visual representation of the reading using words and images. There are no rules other than to show your understanding. I find this activity to be a great assessment because students have to really process what they read and this involves re-reading and more repetition!
Students are each randomly assigned a chunk of the story to smashdoodle.
The next day, students share their work with each other. First, I group them by like-paragraphs; all the students who drew paragraph two, share your work and get ideas from each other. Then I put them into groups with other students so that each chunk of the story is represented. Together they retell the story one more time.
At this point, I let them play Quizlet with the train vocabulary words and provide more input through slides and oral questioning. We play a bunch of games, learn a little grammar, and culminate the unit with an oral assessment in which students must purchase a train ticket and navigate in the train station. To see these additional activities, please visit my store!
