Family Lesson Plan (La Familia)

The past week we have been working on a Family Unit.  We all had lots of fun with this unit because we looked at lots and lots of family photos as we discussed vocbulario de la familia.  The kids seemed to catch on to the vocabulary very quickly, and since the grammar was mostly a review, we only spent a week on family.  Our Tuesdays and Thursdays are full with Classical Conversations and gymnastics, so that leaves us with 3 days per week for our Spanish lessons.  Below is an outline of how our lessons went over the three days:

Day 1

Introduce Vocabulary

Vocab: hijo(a), niño(a), hermano(a), madre, padre, mamá, papá, abuelo(a), bisabuelo(a), mascota, nieto(a), sobrino(a), primo(a), tío(a)

To introduce the vocabulary, I made a Powerpoint slideshow of pictures of all the people in our family.  Each slide contained one photo and one or two vocab words.  (For example if the picture was of my oldest son and his grandma, the title of the slide was Nieto/Abuela.) I had the vocab words fly onto the screen with sound effects, which the boys loved!  

Next we played Old Maid (La solterona) with a family Old Maid game I found at the Dollar Store.  I wrote the names in Spanish on each card, for example Uncle Joe became Tío José and Grandma June became Abuela Junio.  Each time we got a match, we had to say the name on the card in Spanish.

Introduce Grammar

Our grammar to go along with the theme of familia is to continue our study of masculine vs. feminine words as well as discuss the terms "mayor" (older) and "menor" (younger).  In case you haven't noticed, we are not studying in-depth grammar. Since my boys are both so young, I feel deep grammar lessons would be useless.  My goal is to hit one, maybe two grammar points each lesson.

To practice el/la words, we sorted all the Old Maid cards according to gender.  Then I held up random cards for the boys to tell me el/la, abuelo or abuela, etc.

To discuss the concept of older and younger, I asked my sons which one of them is the "hermano mayor" and the "hermano menor".  We talked about other siblings we knew and which of them would be "mayor" or "menor".  The Old Maid cards have older and younger brothers/sisters, so we practiced using  the grammar while we played the game.

Day 2

Review Vocabulary

To start off our review of family vocabulary, I had the boys each pick their favorite photo album.  We looked through each of the photo albums and named all the people in our family.  We talked about how some members of our family had lots of names, for example Grandma could be, abuela, madre, hija, and tía.  Lastly we watched the familia slideshow again.

Review Grammar

For today's grammar review we read La Semana de Cookie, a book that my kids love.  After we read it, I said we were going to have a contest, girls vs. boys, to see if there were more masculine or feminine words in the book.  We made a chart on the white board to keep track.  The boys were ecstatic that the masculine words won by 2.

Day 3

Review Vocabulary

We started off by watching the Family slideshow one last time.  This time we used it as a quiz.  They boys each took turns guessing the title before it flew onto the screen.  

Capstone Project

To complete our familia unit we made family trees.  I had two sets of pictures of each member of our family.  The boys chose their pictures and cut out the faces (with some, well lots, of help).  I had construction paper with the boxes and lines already drawn for the shape of the family tree.  I also had labels printed with each persons title/name.  First the boys peeled and stuck the labels in the proper places, then we glued the pictures onto construction paper in the form of the family tree.

Not the most beautiful family tree, but the kids loved doing it, and you get the idea of it!

Next up will be The Body (El cuerpo)....