César Chávez

At my school, we are in the process of moving away from our Realidades textbook units (with the vocabulary lists and specific grammar points) in Spanish 3 and moving towards more engaging, more culturally-related, more communicative units. One recent unit that we developed is one about César Chávez. The other teacher that teaches Spanish 3 has shown the César Chávez movie, but has not really done anything else with it. The movie is in English with a little bit of Spanish. To me, it seemed more like a social studies activity... valuable, but with very little Spanish! So, we decided to make a cultural mini-unit around the movie. Our rural New Hampshire students had never even heard of César Chávez. So I started by showing them this table, which shows the states that observe a César Chávez day: 

(*Note* According to a comment below, Wisconsin does not observe César Chávez day. But, according to this article in Time, it does. )

That got them interested and from there I introduced the Essential Questions, the "I can" statements, and the Evaluaciones for the unit.

Essential Questions for the unit (unit packet for students):

• Cuando hay mucha desigualdad en la sociedad, cómo puede cambiarla una persona?
• ¿Por qué son los movimientos sociales importantes dentro de un país?
• ¿Por qué es César Chávez tan importante?

"I can" statements for the end of the unit:

• I can understand spoken and written information about César Chávez. (slideshow) (slideshow for listening quiz and vocabulary quiz)
• I can read about César Chávez and identify the important parts of his life and his movement. (slideshow and Quizlet practice)
• I can describe the life of César Chávez, the movement he started, and why he was so important.

Evaluaciones:

• Formative: Prueba de vocabulario
• Formative: Prueba de escuchar - Listen to statements about César Chávez's life and identify which picture corresponds to each statement.
• Summative: Evaluación escrita - Answer the Preguntas Esenciales. You will be expected to use the information from the slideshow and the movie, and the vocabulary that you learn throughout the unit (here and here). You can prepare notes before the test and use them during the test.

With the help of Arianne Dowd's slideshow, I was able to start with an explanation his life and the importance of it. The words in red were "vocabulary words" that students wrote in the unit packet as they listened to me talk about César Chávez. I created two Quizlets to go along with the slideshow: one for vocabulary (Spanish to Spanish) and the other with the information in the slideshow. My students are big fans of Quizlet Live these days, so we played a few rounds of that. Students also did a write-draw-talk activity that is in the unit packet.

After spending some time learning about César, we watched the video below. We watched it a few times, once on .5 speed. It was amazing how much the students could understand! And just another way for them to see the importance of him.

Then, we had some more vocabulary (the other teacher created this list to go along with the questions) and played some more Quizlet Live. Then we watched the movie in parts and answered comprehension questions along the way. I bought the questions here.

Students did exceptionally well on the final unit assessment! Their writing was definitely in the intermediate range as they had a variety of tenses and were creating (messily) with the language. Also, many said how surprised they were that they knew nothing about him before this unit. And it was a nice break from our normal units. 

This was the "song of the week" that we had for the week. It is tangentially related :)