Tarjetas Navideñas

Now that all of our K-4 students are together in one school, I thought it would be fun for the 'big kids' (4th graders) to make Christmas and Channukah cards for our Kindergartners. It is a fun way for students to use the language for a real purpose and builds community between grade levels, fostering the notion that Spanish can be used to communicate with others. We are keeping the messages very simple, so that the Kinders can understand them, with a related illustration on front. The added bonus is that students reinforce letter-writing vocabulary, such as 'Dear...' and 'Besos y abrazos' or 'Saludos' or 'Adiós'.

Too cute!

¡Torta!

I devised this card game, modeled after 'Torta' (a game from Spain) and Slapjack. My fourth graders are working on the constructions 'me gusta', 'me gusta mucho', 'no me gusta' and 'me encanta' with various activities such as skiing, playing basketball, reading, etc- 12 total. I found a bunch of picture depictions for each activity and made enough copies to make about 84 cards (thereby each activity is represented several times).
To play I divided the class into two teams and split the deck in half. (I prearranged the cards so there would be lots of matches). A member from each team comes up and they both turn over a card at the same time, like in Slapjack. If the cards are the same, the first kid to slap the cards and call out 'Torta' is the winner, but not until he or she has made a sentence with the activity and one of the constructions (like 'Me gusta patinar'). That team then gets all the cards that have been turned over. If the cards are not the same, the next two players come up to turn a card, and so on. At the end of class, I tally how many cards each team has and a point goes to the team with the most cards. I keep a running scoreboard so we can track over time how the teams are doing.