Pre-AP and/or AP Unit: Diamantes Negros

I am starting AP Spanish this week and our first unit is called "Diamantes Negros". It is based around the movie with the same name. It incorporates four of the AP themes and tons of the AP sub themes (see slide 3 in the slideshow below).

Here is a trailer of the movie:

I have 16 students with a very wide variety of proficiency levels:

• 6 students who took Spanish 4 Honors (very traditional, with lots of grammar and vocabulary, but very little exposure to the AP themes and/or AP assessments) second semester last year (that is 7 months without Spanish!!)
• 5 who just finished that same Spanish 4 Honors (very traditional, with lots of grammar and vocabulary, but very little exposure to the AP themes and/or AP assessments) 
• 5 who took Spanish 4 Honors last year and have just completed Cultura y Civilización (lots of exposure to AP themes AP assessments)

So, with that in mind, and 11 weeks (we have a week of in February and one of in April) to get them ready for the AP exam (!!!), I (with lots of help from Arianne Dowd) developed this unit. I want the students to be talking a lot this first week and I also want to give them tons of comprehensible input. I also want them to do some AP type assessments. The super inspiring and helpful Karen Goering shared four assessments at ACTFL (amazing presentation about movies and social justice) that I will be using in this unit (click here to find them) and she is the one who inspired me to use this movie in class.

Arianne Dowd and I created a slideshow (with 170 slides!) that tells the "story" of the movie in comprehensible Spanish and with screen shots from the movie. This will help all students to feel comfortable and will especially help those students who haven't had Spanish since June. You can see a preview of the slideshow below and if you want access to the whole thing (170 slides total!), you can download it for free here.

So here is my plan for this unit:

• Students will sit in groups of 3 (with one student from each of the groups I mentioned above) and everyday they will read (aloud) the slideshow and discuss the questions (in the slideshow). The images will help them to understand the story. After that, we will watch segments of the movie.
• At the beginning, students will have to fill out some information on slides 3-17 in the "unit packet"(click here to see part of it and here if you want to purchase it). I have also created two Quizlets to review that information (here and here).
• For homework, students will read the "story" again and fill in the blanks in the unit packet. The blanks are vocabulary and grammar related. I tried to include a lot of subjunctive and present perfect. These students have been exposed to a lot of grammar, so they will be comfortable doing that. Also, they need to be able to purposefully use some of that advanced grammar in order to do well on the AP exam.
• Students will also do Karen Goering's activities throughout the unit, at home or in class. 

This type of unit is almost like teaching with a novel, but the writing (summaries) isn't as good... but there is audio and video too!

And, Arianne Dowd made the perfect movie talk and song to start the unit! Click here to make a copy. Thanks Arianne!