Ghost Stories in Spanish

Students in level three Spanish will spend the first two weeks of October studying the culture and language of scary folk tales from Spanish Speaking countries. La Llorona, el Chupacabras and many other stories will be used to teach important vocabulary and grammatical structures to improve fluency. Not only will students hear and re-tell the stories, they will also be given reading practice using alternate versions of the stories. The listening, reading, and writing elements make up the formative assessments with the speaking assessment being the final summative grade. At the end of the unit, students should be able to clearly tell (in Spanish) one of the stories aloud.

Students will be given flip cameras in groups of 4 and will be asked to create a film version of one of the stories using the cameras and Podcasting or Tool Factory software. The students can use tool factory to blend still pictures, video, and sound clips to make the stories more engaging for the rest of the class as we view them together. Because the students are trying to develop 21st century skills, the exposure to the technology of movie making/podcasting will be as valuable to them as the additional exposure to Spanish.

The benefits to the classes are that each student will get to see videos from 5 other groups and therefore will be exposed to input in Spanish as they enjoy the contributions of their classmates to the folk tale unit! At the end of the unit, the 6 groups could post their folk tale videos on the school website and TeacherTube where we could share them with other schools who were interested in a similar project.

In addition to the benefit of input in the foreign language, this unit allows students to gradually move up Bloom's taxonomy from simply recognizing vocabulary in a folk tale to creating a folk tale of their own using high level thinking skills. We want our students to become critical thinkers and I believe that this project meets many of ACTFL's 21st century skills.