Teaching Spanish Vocabulary - Clothing

In trying to jump start my blogging, or actually the recording of day to day events, I thought I'd start with what I did today.

This year, I have a Spanish 1 class. 14 students, 10 of them girls. About 7 of them perfectionists. Working with perfectionists is a little different, fortunately my daughter broke me in.

But, no energy to pontificate on my policies of working with perfectionists. I'm here just to relate how I tried to teach my students clothing vocabulary in Spanish this morning.

Last week, some mothers brought in lots of doll clothes. I introduced the vocabulary basics.

This week, I hunted for 14 dolls to take into class. Quite a feat to find 14 dolls in my house...well, actually, I didn't. In addition to 9 dolls from various countries, I ended up taking in a "Woody", an Angel Rally monkey, a USC Rally monkey, and a couple of "Build-A-Bears", all fully clothed. I put one "doll" in front of each student. I gave each student a chance to tell me what their "doll" was wearing, along with the colors of each clothing item.

In advance to the class, I took the doll clothes that different mothers had brought in the previous week, and I create 14 different outfits on index cards. Some of the outfits made sense (they matched), others were just a little outlandish. In addition to writing the clothing item and it's color on the cards, I added in new vocabulary if I want to talk about a print or a design on the clothing. In class, I put all of the clothes in a laundry basket, mixed them up, and then handed each student an index card with the outfit on it and instructed them to find the outfit. It was a fun time, especially when a couple of students grabbed the wrong items and left the other students with things that didn't match their descriptions at all! Then they had to cooperate in order to get the correct outfit in front of them.

I guess I'll figure out if this activity worked next week, when they take the vocabulary quiz! But, by then, we will have moved on to "food vocabulary", which I introduced this morning. Should be a great time!