Using Movie Clips to Help Narrate the Past

Since my last posting, my students and I have been working diligently on the past and I am super pleased to say that for the first time in my seven years of teaching it they are HAVING FUN with it as opposed to being afraid. I am attributing it to the fact that my approach has been far more differentiated than it has been in previous years and we have examined it in a variety of different aspects.

Of all of the activities that we have done, the one thing that is really working and keeping kids engaged is examining the past through the use of movie clips.

Animated short films or cortometrajes are great for this. Oktapodi, Lifted, La Luna, Presto and One Man Band are among some of my favorites and can all be found on YouTube.

Call me nerdy, but after teaching narration of the past for the last seven years, all I see is preterite vs. imperfect when watching a film like that. As I explain to my kids, it pairs quite well. When narrating a scene in the past, all of the background stuff that is going on that you generally glance over in a movie is the imperfect. It sets the scene, it makes things interesting, and without it it is hard to fall in love with the characters, and to get emotionally invested. The best animated short films pay really close attention to that and then jam in as much preterite into a short amount of time as possible to keep things interesting. From my perspective, the preterite is all of those things that avert attention from that pretty background and those cute little characters. 

Take the movie Up for example, when Mr. Frederickson´s house is flying over the city, you see a big, beautiful house floating through clouds, hanging from balloons of every color over the rooftops of skyscrapers and so forth when all of the sudden you hear the crack of thunder. No longer are you processing that scene-- it becomes secondary. All of your attention is focused on the action. (the preterite)

This particular unit we have vocabulary related to family gatherings. I really wanted my students to be able to synthesize both their new vocabulary with their new grammar, so I chose to show the following clip of the ¨Top Five Disney Weddings¨

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0ykxKbNTgo

In English, we narrated #5 and discussed which conjugation we would use and why.  As a class we narrated #4 in Spanish together and then they were given the choice to narrate #1, #2, or #3 on their own.

As a challenge, I told them not to share with their peers which clip they were narrating. If they narrated it well, we should have been able to figure it out based on their description.

A few tootsie rolls up for grabs, and all of the sudden this writing was fun.It gave them the motivation they needed to make sure that their writing and description was thorough as opposed to thrown together and vague.

I'm excited to see the progression the rest of this year, and I hope that they continue to embrace it with a growth mindset.