Jamie Does your school have a vacation in the spring? We still have a week off in April, and I love to give vacation homework for Spanish class! Of course, I make it optional, but these ideas can work for 3 day weekends, a whole week or even during the summer!
My Favorite Vacation Homework For Spanish Class
My favorite homework assignment when students are on vacation is to watch TV! Yup! I ask them to watch anything at all in Spanish! Try suggesting that they watch a show or movie they’re familiar with and have seen several times. They are instructed to change the language to Spanish and put on the Spanish subtitles. We talk about how when my husband moved here from Spain, he found that his English classes there hadn’t prepared him to understand people in regular life interactions. He trained his ear to understand better by listening and reading the captions while watching TV!
What I find really neat is that a lot of times my students will watch movies and shows that are native to the culture, like telenovelas! Often, they will give me recommendations for a show or movie I didn’t know about. It’s a win-win!
HERE is a copy of the reporting sheet I give to students to tell me about what they watched. It’s in my free resource library, so you will need your password! (Don’t have it? Get it HERE!)
Vacation Homework: Option #2
Another idea for vacation homework for Spanish class is to ask your students to leave you a voicemail. This can be on your actual school voicemail, or they can do a voice memo and send you the file via email. Students can talk about what they did if they’re using the past tense, what they’re doing today if they’re in the present time frame, or even what they will do in the coming days for future time frame! Or, you could give them a different topic too! It’s really neat to hear their voices and interesting to hear what they want to tell you.
Vacation Option #3
Edpuzzles are a great way to review a grammar topic that was learned previously. For example, I find that my year 3 students, sadly, don’t remember the possessive adjectives. It’s not part of the curriculum in year 3, but when I offer a quick Edpuzzle to review it, their Spanish improves!
Edpuzzles can be found or made on just about any topic. I had a recent post about how to use Edpuzzles or make your own a few weeks ago. You can read it HERE! These are great if you don’t want any correcting, because you can use Edpuzzles with multiple choice questions only! Look at the class report to see who tried it and what their score was!
Vacation Homework for Spanish Class #4
My last suggestion is to give them an activity that presents a cultural nugget of information. Since we are coming up on Spring and Easter, here is a great suggestion. THIS YouTube video talks about the confetti eggs (cascarones) that are made in Mexico. I asked students to watch the video and try making the eggs themselves. Of course, not all students did this. But the few that love culture and have some extra time during vacation loved this! They will probably remember the time they and their family made these confetti eggs and threw them at each other! I love when students have memories like that!
Homework Can Be Controversial
These days, there’s a lot of debate about the value of homework, and after the pandemic, I think many people have learned that better work-life balance is needed. I no longer give required homework over vacation, but I love giving the students who WANT to learn and do more the chance to do so! In my gradebook, I add the word OPTIONAL to the title. A score is given to each student who completed it, and I exempt everyone else.
What is your stance on homework? Do you give it daily? Weekly? What about over vacations? Email me and let me know! contactspecialtyspanish@gmail.com
