CI Interviews: Estrella del Día

Update 9/6/21: Here are my questions for this semester.

Update 1/29/20: Here are my questions fo this semester.

Update 8/18/19: Here are the questions that I will be using this year. And here is a template of the slideshow.

(Previous Post about La Estrella del Día)

I just started doing La Estrella del Día interviews in Spanish 1 and I am remembering how awesome it is! Versions of this are very popular in the "CI Teaching World". I learned about it from Sabrina Janczak at TCI Maine in 2015 (Sabrina said that she adapted the idea from Bryce Hedstrom's "La Persona Especial" idea). I blogged about it then, but I wanted to post about it again.

I have done these Estrella del Día interviews in Spanish 1 and Spanish 3 and it does take up a lot of class time, but it is totally worth it!

La Estrella del Día is explained pretty thoroughly in that blog post, but I have copied and pasted some of it here because I wanted to share it again.

Here is the process:

• Students fill out a form with interview questions on it (with the help from me). 
• Here is a document that I created (very similar to what Sabrina shared). Feel free to make a copy and add or subtract questions.
• The teacher collects the sheets and then "interviews" 2-4 students a week. Students have their sheet in front of them and they read their answers. The rest of the class listens respectfully. The question slideshow, with images to help comprehension (this one is for Spanish 1), is projected during the interview so that everyone understands.
• During the interview, the teacher asks follow up questions to the star of the day and/or asks related questions to the class. Also, I type their answers as they talk.
• The teacher also takes a picture of them the day of the interview.
• The day after the interview, the teacher shares the slideshow (with pictures that illustrate the answers and the picture of the student) to review the information shared the day before.
• Here are some examples from my Spanish 1 class this semester
• At the end of the week, there is a quiz (more personalized CI!). The quiz includes 6 sentences about each person that was interviewed that week and students have to write who each sentence was about.
• This is an ongoing activity that will take many weeks.

Here are the reasons WHY I LOVE this activity (most of these are what Sabrina shared at TCI Maine):

• Repetition that never gets boring
• Compelling: it's always about them, their favorite topic
• Students feel important and special 
• Make students shine
• Authentic conversation
• Supported output (students use notes)
• It includes writing, speaking, reading and listening
• A chance to practice 1st, 2nd, 3rd person forms
• Higher order thinking
• Creates fantastic class culture 
• Students can acquire some advanced grammatical structures, such as: imperfect subjunctive, conditional, present perfect, and others, depending on the questions you decide