A few new resources for "La Gastronomía"

I am in the midst of my "La Diversidad de la Gastronomía" unit in my Cultura y Civilización (level 4, 5, 6, and 7) class. I love this unit and I have blogged about it a few times before (here and here).

Two of my favorite resources for this unit are these songs: La Cumbia del Mole por Lila Downs and El Mole por El Virulo. These songs show a lot of cultural products, practices, and perspectives related to food and they are an excellent prelude to watch the movie Canela. I also created this Edpuzzle for La cumbia del Mole to use as an assessment after students have done some work with the song and video.

We are also watching Master Chef Latino: Trío de tacos. We are watching about 15-20 minutes a lot (of 85 minute classes), and we pause and discuss frequently. I love this show and students are really enjoying it a lot too! You can watch it with English subtitles or Spanish subtitles.

Also, I recently went to Mexico (very briefly for two stops on a cruise) and did a chocolate tour. I bought some delicious chocolate to share with my students, but realized that I needed to teach them something about the history of chocolate, so I found the two videos below and then created some activities to do with each of them. Students see/hear these two videos THREE times:

1. Watch and listen. Write what they see and here.
2. Cloze activity with transcript AND some comprehension activities. Cloze activities with authentic resources give students so much scaffolding and confidence. Many of the comprehension questions are in English because I want to assess their interpretive listening/reading skills with this activity, no their presentational writing skills.
3. Watch one more time and just listen. It is amazing for them to see how much they can now hear and understand.