Breakout for Brandon Brown Quiere un Perro

 I wrote my first breakout! It's finished and ready! It was super fun to write and my kids are loving it.

El Perrito Está Perdido- Lost Lucky

Thanks to Carol Gaab and FluencyMatters for giving me permission to share freely with other teachers.  Please note that this breakout is licensed under an Atttribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 Creative Commons License.  That means you can share and adapt it as long as you do not profit from it. Use of this work or any part of it for commercial purposes is not permitted.

What is this breakout all about?

In the book Brandon Brown Quiere un Perro, a dog gets lost and found, but we don't really know what happened.  This is the story of the girl who lost the dog.  It is written from her perspective and should be comprehensible for students who have read the book.  There is also a past-tense version of the readings if you want to run it with that text.  Bonus- once you set up the clues, you don't have to do anything other than swap out the readings.

What is a breakout anyway?  

Here are some useful articles for teachers who use CI and Breakouts.
What they are and how to put together a kit
A Breakout for Newbies
Breakout Edu Website  (Confession- I find the website and sharing platform to be difficult and frustrating.  I love the activities but the website is just hard to use!)


Some words of advice:

1) This breakout is HARD!  There are suggestions in the set-up documents for how to make it easier or more challenging.
2) I do not run this breakout as a timed breakout.  It is hard!  Instead, I give students a certain number of "tries" with each lock- between 15 and 20 tickets.  I prefer to do input based breakouts this way so students spend the time getting the input, then trying to solve the puzzles.  It took my kids more than an hour and half to break out.  But they all told me that it was not "too hard".
3) I ask that students read all the "chapters" together, out loud, before working on the puzzles.  This keeps the focus on the input.
4) I probably would not do this as my first breakout with a group.  For an introductory breakout, I suggest you use Vamos a Bolivia.

Note: I run my breakouts with 1 box. 
Here is how I do it:

• Prepare group folders with all materials, including hint cards and UV light pens.  This is super time consuming, but I think it is worth the trouble. 
• Assign kids to heterogenous groups  I aim for 4-6 kids in a group.  
• Give each group a team tracking sheet and a certain number of tickets or stickers.  One ticket = 1 minute with each lock, until the last day (or last 15 minutes), when it is 1 ticket=30 seconds with each lock.
• I have a master sheet that I use to track who opened what lock and I use tally marks to keep track of their tickets.
• When a group opens all the locks, they...hang out.  I ask them to read or work on illustrating stories for our library until most of the other groups have finished or have come closer to finishing.  THEN they get the glory of opening the locks in front of everyone.  

Video: the most terrifying thing I have done in a long time

I filmed myself asking a story.

It is possibly the scariest thing I have done in ages.  No. Posting it is the scary part.  I could dwell on all the flaws.  (Because there are many areas to improve.) I could be very cruel to myself and hate on all the things that women typically hate on.  I could be embarrassed about my language (Because truth be told, ever since my first so-called mentor told me seven years ago that I had no business teaching Spanish during my first year teaching, I have been embarrassed to speak in front of adults. I know.  I need to get over that.).

But instead, I am choosing to look at what went really well.  I laugh so much during this video.  My kids do too.  It was a funny day.  The kids surprised me.  One of my actors had words falling out of his mouth.  I paused and pointed, went S.L.O.W. - maybe even too slow- and stayed in the target language for the better part of the hour.  I did lots of brain breaks and used actors and introduced a parallel character.  The story is absolutely hilarious, creative, and memorable.

So, in the spirit of doing one thing that is terrifying: here is my video. If it doesn't play, click here.  

Background:
Curriculum/story: this is from Somos, Unit 6, and I have taught it so very many times that I mostly don't need a script.  The structures I am lighly targeting are se levanta, se sienta, and le grita.
This unit is available for free.

Grade/level: these are my "honors" 7th graders, in Spanish 1.  They are, as a group, fast processors with a lot of language kicking around in their head.  They are NOT beginning language learners, so if you are watching and thinking about your own students, know that I am adjusting my pacing and my language use for this group- everything is faster and they need fewer repetitions.

What you won't see: A ton of repetition or circling.  These kids just don't need it- they don't need me to circle anything to death.  As I grow as a TPRS/CI teacher, I am getting a better handle on when to ask a billion questions, and when not to.  If this were a novice class, it would look much different.

Goals: In a pre-assessment (I used TPR), I realized that they comprehend the three structures, but they have never experienced them in writing nor from different perspectives.  My goal was to co-create a funny story that we can work with over the next week, doing activities such as rewriting from different perspectives and adding more characters in order to work on those other forms (me siento, le grito, les gritan, etc.).  I know from experience that this story (and unit) is truly an introduction to such lofty grammar topics as Indirect Object Pronouns and Reflexive Verbs, and I do not at all expect them to use the pronouns correctly for a long time.  This is just more good input.  

Input Based Stations for an Advanced Class

I LOVE this book.

Thanks to other great thinkers, I created my own input based stations as an introduction to the Fluency Matter’s novel Esperanza.  

As I was preparing to teach this for the first time last year, I felt totally overwhelmed by the resources available and the huge amount of background that I think is important to teach this novel.  Add to that the simple fact that I love Guatemala and having lived there several times and worked with a language school focused on worker’s issues and other social justice concerns, I have a ton of schema and a serious passion for this material.  I also wanted to experiment with some technology tools like Edpuzzle.

I decided to use these resources to create mostly input based stations for my most advanced class. This group is a very strong class  of 8th graders, roughly Spanish 2 Honors.  The idea is that they work in pairs or small groups and I float and support them.  

Logistics: 

You can never give directions often enough.

• I used our learning platform (Canvas) to create an instruction page for each station with directions, links, etc.
• I also made 1 page directions to slip into each station folder.  (You can never have too many directions.) 
• Since I am deskless, instead of having locations for the stations, I just put all materials in folders and kids work where ever makes sense for them.
• Our school utilizes a “big brother” type program called GoGuardian that allows me to see all the students’ screens at once to monitor them when they are sprawled around the room.  
• Fast finishers: groups tend to finish at different times, so students have the following options if they finish before everyone else: read their FVR novel, work on their Chicken Bus designs (after doing station C), or color their 6 facts sheet (after doing station D).  This way, students could work at different rates but still be occupied.   

Drawbacks: 

I quickly realized that a couple of the activities were very challenging and prone to misunderstanding, and I needed either to work with that group directly or scaffold and adapt the materials.

It is hard to monitor comprehension when kids
are sprawled everywhere, but that is OK once
in a while. 

Also, I don’t grade much in my classes other than assessments, so I found that it was tricky to see if they understood (or more critically) misunderstood the core concepts without grading every activity.  To get around this, I decided to let go of the idea that they needed to get EVERYTHING PERFECTLY. Instead, floated from group to group.   I spot checked their work, asked questions, and asked them to find the evidence in the text for their answers.  I also have a pretty good sense now of what they are going to misunderstand (and who is most likely to do so) and I can spot check that too. 

Activities:

Station A
Resources adapted from Sharon Birch, (both her TPT store and her blog) and the song, Ave que Emigra, by Gaby Moreno

Students do a matching activity to review vocabulary.  Students read a short booklet that is a narrative of the song.  They listened to the song, read the lyrics, and answered a few questions about it (and drew a line from the song) and an accompanying video.  

I really love manipulatives.
This is a matching activity for mapping.

Station B- Resources adapted  from Martina Bex: Geography lesson

Students read an informational text about the geography of Guatemala and answered comprehension questions.  Then, they placed pictures of geographical features in their approximate place on an 11 x 17 map using internet resources and the reading. 

Station C- Resources adapted from Martina Bex:Central American Chicken Busses

Students did a fan-n-pick type discussion with a partner for 4 minutes to connect prior knowledge of transportation systems (especially public transport and busses).  Then, they watched a video that I modified on EdPuzzle and embedded some short, comprehensible discussion questions (what did you see? What colors do you see? What do you think that bus driver likes to do?) Students responded out loud with their partners in short phrases or simple sentences, depending on their level.  Finally, they read a comprehensible text about chicken busses and did a compare/contrast activity about the system of transportation here and in Guatemala.  For fast finishers, they also got to design and color their own chicken bus.  

Drawing...and summarizing.

Station D- Resources adapted from the Teacher’s Guide published by Fluency Matters, my own materials, and various sites around the internet.  

Students watched a slideshow with very basic facts about Guatemala (kind of an overview with facts about $, clothing, population) and students simply summarize six facts and draw their understanding.  

There is a LOT of drawing (and coloring) during these four days and I think, for the most part, they really like it.  My 8th graders are still kids at heart, and I know that when we finish the stations, we are going to dive into some of the uglier sides of this amazing country, the internal armed conflict, the genocides, and the violence.  So, I don’t mind coloring for a bit.