Coco: A sequence of lessons, anchoring in challenge!

In this blogpost I am focussing on project based learning and how we spent 6 weeks in Y9 studying the film Coco. We did this right after the Easter Holidays leading up to the May half-Term. Previously, we had studied the topic of TV learning to describe different types of TV programmes, comparing them, saying why students like/ liked some and not others. The idea was to link such vocabulary to a real film, while learning about South-American culture, Mexico and the Day of the dead. Students have two lessons per week in Y9 and this sequence of lessons was intended for a top set but it was slightly updated for all abilities. 

We started by watching the film Coco in Spanish with English subtitles. For that, we payed for the film in Youtube. 

We created two sentence builders. Sentence Builder 1 is what we called Levels 1 and 2 and focusses on what is the film about and how to describe the plot. 

Sentence Builder 2, was a short one and we called it Level 10 and focussed on giving an opinion about the film.  ( Levels 3-9 were not covered in the 6 weeks of teaching, due to lack of time, but it included descriptions of clothes and relationships among members of the film).

We also created a Memrise course to go with the unit for students to learn the chunks that we were covering in lessons.  For Memrise Course, click here. 

The sequence of lessons can be found in this Genially below:

 

The film and all the activities presented in this Genially were carried out within 12 lessons and involved tasks following the EPI/Lexicogrammar approach by Dr Gianfranco Conti, with my own variations and use of digital tasks. 

The sequence starts with modelling activities when a Sentence Builder is introduced, including repetition, dictation, delayed dictation, finishing the sentence after me etc.. with the use of MWBs and lots of praise and merits for every 3 correct answers (my students always keep a tally in their MWBs and at the end they collect their merits). This motivates all students as they want to do well to get their merits at the end of the lesson.

The planned sequence, involves students learning the vocabulary, little by little, using the Memrise courses, in a Flipped Classroom scenario, so when the Sentence Builder was introduced for the first time, students were very familiar with the vocabulary. Spanish being a phonetic language is great for this!

For many lessons, after modelling, we practised the vocabulary in many different ways, until students mastered the Sentence Builders, and believe me they did!!! We carried out, translations via LearningApps, Textivate, Oral Ping-Pong, Battleships and more traditional translations where students were working in Pairs and competing with each other!

I recycled the Wheel of Names activities as starter/plenaries and whole class oral/written activities as needed! By the end of the 12 week period, students could carry out the final writing task from memory and talk for around 2 minutes on Coco. 

The sequence also includes a cute listening activity which I created with Snapchat, inspired by Naziha de Londres. I love this type of video, listening activities because I can vary my vocabulary, speed etc and personalise the learning experience!

Finally, students learned about Day of the Dead in Mexico and carried out a Poster using Spanish and English where they wrote about Coco but also what they had learned about the Day of the Dead.

Why I love it!

The sentence builders are, deliberately, quite complex as they allow me to introduce Direct Object pronouns easily: "su tatarabuelo los abandonó" or "su familia lo obliga a ser zapatero". We dedicated a lesson towards the end analysing these Object Pronouns and comparing the two sentences above with "merece la pena verla"  Why lo/los/la? why in the case of "verla" the pronoun appears after the verb? What is the rule? This grammatical point will be reinforced after half term when we introduce our last topic: food and we learn "lo comí" etc.. Similarly, we revised the past tense, which students had already learned, and I introduced the future "si promete que no será músico".  

Furthermore, students learned about Mexican culture, watched a real film with a purpose and learned sophisticated vocabulary at GCSE level! They loved that as they felt "clever": anchoring in challenge! The sequence also allowed students manipulate the language and conjugate verbs in different tenses while giving their real opinion on something relatable to them!