Fuegos: Ignite lite for Spanish I finals
Ignite talks are short and fast. They’re like Pecha Kucha, with 20 carefully timed images, but they’re even shorter.
I mean, yeah, you can rehearse and rehearse (and rehearse) an ignite talk to time it perfectly (and that’s actually a good option for kiddos just breaking out of Novice Land), but everything that comes out of your mouth has to come out of your head.
Not off a card or a screen.
My wise amiga Sra. Hawkins says it’s hard to fill up the 20 seconds in Pecha Kucha in your native language, so my plan is to go with the 15 seconds. And because it’s hard to hold five solid minutes of anything in your head in high school, I want to cut the slides back to 10. That’s 2 1/2 minutes in the target language.
My kids can do that.
I want this to be an opportunity for reflection, some metacognition in the ol’ L2. So I’ve come up with a list of suggested topics I know they can talk about–and that might benefit next year’s kiddos:
- What you can do in Spanish now
- What not to do in Spanish I
- Problems you can have in Spanish I
- What helps you learn Spanish
- How Spanish helps you
- How you like to use Spanish
- How you are going to use Spanish in the future
- How Spanish I is like a game
- How Spanish I can be more like a game
- How to use games to learn skills
- What you need to know about Hispanics in the U.S
- How to find ideas for a good product
- How to make a good product
- How not to make a good product
- How to make a good presentation for your product
- How to attract Hispanic consumers to your product
- How to communicate with people in your group
I would also be really interested in what students could come up with, but they would have to be able to have a discussion with me–in Spanish–about what they want their topic to be and what they are actually able to say about it–in Spanish. I’m all for it if they can come up with something cool and useful that’s actually, you know, within their powers!
Now for someone who has disavowed presentational Spanish at the novice level, this whole “exam” is definitely incomplete. I could easily get presentational writing in there by having them writing and revising what they plan to say, and we can add the interpersonal with a quick 2 1/2 minute Q&A on their topic to fill out the rest of their five minutes, as I’ve done in final presentations past.
The reading and writing are a little trickier to work in, but I think I can edit together some of the post-product-presentation interviews with our guest “investors” for the listening, and I might go the personalized route once again with the reading section once I have their topics, picking out blogs and infographs and whatever I can find that would tie in with what they plan to present.
Can you think of any other topics you would like to hear at the end of Spanish I?
