Making Spanish relevant

Two things that I have really strived for this year is to incorporate more comprehensible input in every class as well as personalizing what we are learning to make it more relevant. As a result my Spanish I students are more excited about Spanish than I have ever seen before in a group and they can produce so much more language. It has been absolutely amazing. Here are some specifics of what I have done:

PQA - almost daily as a class we sit down and I just ask them questions in Spanish about their life (I have a class of only 11 making this very doable). This gets them hearing things over and over again as well as gives them opportunity to talk about themself. As a result, students have picked up on how I answer follow up questions or ask similar questions to other students and have started asking each questions as well. It's amazing how I am no longer the sole person keeping the conversation going.

Used stuff they bring in - One kid had a song in Spanish he just wanted to share so I asked him to write down the name and artist and then I looked it up on my own time to make sure it was school appropriate and it definitely was - so we listened to a little heavy metal in Spanish. Another kid told me about a SNL skit "La Poicia Mexicana" which I previewed and then will show tomorrow.

Used students names and lives in assingments and assessments - they love seeing their name in something.

During lectures when we got off topic (but still VERY relevant to learning Spanish) I followed their interests. So what if we learn things in a different order.

Create a class story - Just today we started this but the idea has been tossing around in my head for a while. My kids have the present tense down well so I have showed them the preterit and imperfect with a basic difference between the two. Now to reinforce that our next unit is going to be a class story all in Spanish using the two. They have picked a few characters and scene for their story to take place in as well as the basic concept for their story. Tomorrow we will do some character development. They were a little apprehensive as I first introduced the idea but by the end of the hour they couldn't stop throwing ideas back and forth. The basically covered my board with ideas. I will post more as we progress but I'm really excited about the progress we made today.