End of the Year Option 1: Festival of Worksheets

End of the Year Option 1: Festival of Worksheets

This project is a great way to get your kids watching and re-watching videos in the course language as they produce worksheets and answer keys for their classmates. The major benefit for you in choosing this project is that students will get lots of language input, during the process of making their worksheet and answer key, and also during the actual Festival of Worksheets, when they will view other groups’ videos and compete to see if they can find details that the group did not include in the answer key. In order to gain a class point, students will be hunting for the “less-obvious” details that the team did not find as they prepped the answer key.

The entire process requires and rewards close listening and re-listening, so you will have created the conditions for your students to be authentically motivated to listen and re-listen closely during both the “Making the Worksheets” phase, when they watch and re-watch their video(s), as well as the “Festival of Worksheets” phase, when they will watch and re-watch the other groups’ videos. It’s a great break for you at the end of the year, because it gets you off the “stage” and lets the videos do the talking for you, and your students continue to get lots of highquality input in the language. Win-win!

Students will need to interact deeply with a video (or two) in the course language as they produce the worksheets, which will provide them with a good amount of input in the language. As students select the graphic organizer(s) that they want to use for their worksheet(s) and make the key for their peers to use later in the Festival of

Worksheets, they will watch and re-watch their selected (or assigned) video(s) many times, engaging deeply and meaningfully with input that you do not have to provide!

Then, during the actual Festival of Worksheets, students will compete to fill in the most complete details on their worksheets, using their classmates' keys, and amassing class points if a member of class finds details that are not listed on the answer key, to earn points towards a class reward like a game day or another treat). You will gasp in amazement as your students eagerly watch bunches of videos and interact with loads of language!

During the “Preparing the Worksheets” phase, students will watch comprehensible videos, select a graphic organizer that they think fits the information in the video, re-watch the video a few more times, using their

Pablo Román’s “Dreaming Spanish” YuTube Channel

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selected graphic organizer to make an answer key, and (in upper-level classes) create a target-language script for the video.

My recommendations for sources of videos are Pablo Román’s Dreaming Spanish YouTube channel, or Alice Ayel’s YouTube channel, Kathrin Schectman's We Love Deutch website, or Diane Neubauer’s videos in Chinese. Of course, you could also use any video that is comprehensible to your students. If you have been making Video Retells of your class's stories throughout the year, you can use those as well. You can choose to either have the class watch its own videos, or, for a more challenging assignment, have one class work on another class’s videos.

End-of-the-year projects are generally more motivating when students work in partnerships. Since the goal is to keep students engaged as the year winds down, I recommend pairing them up. Myself, I tend to allow them to pick their own partners. This is more motivating to them, and it also gives me a way to encourage them to be on task during our work time. If I can say, “You can work with a friend as long as you keep each other on task and get your work done,” then I can use that to hold them accountable, with the “threat” of having to work on their own or switch to another partnership as the consequence for not working hard.

You can have partnerships select their own videos from a list of possibilities or assign the videos to them, perhaps differentiating with more-challenging videos for the more proficient students and more-familiar videos for the less-proficient. You can have them work with one video, or, to make the project last longer, have them work with two or three videos. Here is a sample of an assignment sheet for this project, made by my friend Ryann Campbell, a Spanish teacher in Washington.

“Dreaming Spanish” “We Love Deutsch” Alice Ayel Diane Neubauer

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First, they will need to watch their video a few times and decide what kind of graphic organizer fits the content of the video best. Since the students will be taking notes in English (unless you are doing this project with more advanced students), I recommend English graphic organizers. The purpose of this activity is to have the students listen and understand, and so demonstrating their understanding in English is fine.

You might ask students to check in with you to show you their selected graphic organizer before they proceed further, to ensure that they have selected an appropriate organizer for their video.

To prepare for the Festival of Worksheets, have students watch their video(s) multiple times and fill in a blank organizer with all the possible answers that they think their classmates will find as they watch the video later. To motivate them to watch their videos super-carefully, inform them that during the Festival of Worksheets, if

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their classmates on the other team find details that they missed, then their team will get a penalty point! More advanced classes can also make scripts that transcribe the content of the video. These scripts can become a useful tool for you to use with your classes next year. If you are using your own classes' Video Retells, you can have students subtitle the videos for future classes to enjoy.

You will most likely need to devote at least three class periods to the video viewing and creating the answer keys. If students are working with more than one video, you might need to devote more time than that to the preparation.

It’s all about getting the students to interact with language input that is not coming from your mouth, and setting up conditions that encourage multiple viewings of the same videos, to get repeated exposures to comprehensible language.

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