Interactive Notebook Page: Student Interests

I would love to give you a template for my student interests vocabulary page, but you have to make your own.

It really is the whole point of the page.

Week 2 of Spanish I, students can generally figure out  (with enough gesturing, of course) how to interpret questions like ¿Qué tipos de videos o programas te gusta ver? and ¿En qué eres experto?. What they can’t figure out is how to answer them without resorting to their L1.

Enter Nearpod.

After we went through the Me gusta, te gusta, le gusta page, I set up just those two questions (plus one about favorite sitios web to warm up) in order to prime the pump for target language Genius Hour. Picking the right topic is critical to successful Genius Hour passion projects, in or out of a foreign language class, so you have to get students to think about what they actually LIKE instead of drawing a blank and picking what looks easiest. That means you must leave the questions pretty open to start off with and make sure they have a relevant starting point vocabulary-wise.

Collecting responses
So instead of drawing a blank, they draw what they’re interested in to respond to questions about their favorite shows and areas of expertise so you can provide the necessary vocabulary.

As the drawings appear, you make a guess as to what the images are, gesturing where possible and reinforcing the previous me gusta/te gusta lesson:

YOU: ¿Te gusta…bailar?
THEM: Sí, me gusta bailar.

If you guess correctly, you write the word either on the board or a big piece of chart paper for later reference, including students with the same answer. If you absolutely cannot guess, however, a little L1 may be necessary.

Then when the answers are done, you send yourself an email report, where all of the images will appear, along with the name of the student who drew each. I also take a picture of my board, should I need to erase or work with the vocabulary outside of school.

Grouping vocabulary
After the kiddos have gone for the day, you take that list (or those lists, if you have multiple sections of the class that will be Geniusing) and try to group similar interests, preferably in groups of no more than five vocabulary words. Hint: you can go ahead and cut out dormir. Nothing good ever comes of passion projects on sleeping–not at the novice level anyway.

Once you have your groups, you can enter them on separate Nearpod slides and open up your reports.

Now, there’s probably a better way to harvest images, but the quickest way for me was just to hit print screen and open up a big ol’ Microsoft Paint file. You paste the relevant report screen to the side and then surgically remove the images to go with each category. You try to fit each image group into neat little printer-friendly box areas (Hint: avoid the yellow images–BobEsponja did not copy so well). You should then but actual neat little boxes around each group of images.

Creating notes

Print yourself a test page and figure out how to arrange your neat little boxes on a single notebook page. Hint: tape. Each little box will be a little flap that can be lifted to reveal the grouped vocabulary (just like we talked about in our Interactive Notebook LangCamp Hangout!). Make sure the order of your Nearpod groups match the order you’ve managed to work out on your notebook page.

Then copy the pictures onto some bright paper for the young ones to cut out.

Once the young ones have finished their cutting, flash the first list of vocabulary on the board and have them find the right box. Confirm that everyone has the right box, then let them tape and copy the vocabulary under the new flap.

Rinse, repeat.

When you are finished, you will have a lovely mosaic of student-created images that reflect your actual class’s actual interests as well as a review tool perfect for self-quizzing a la Make It Stick! (I post both the flaps down and flaps open to Instagram so they can play along at home.)