Category: celebration

Language Resident: Franco Rivas Quiroz

Level: Intermediate/Advanced

Class theme/topic discussed: Holidays

Goal of the class:

Students will be able to:

• Discuss the differences of celebrations among cultures in latin america and the US.
• Describe a celebration that is relevant for them using frequency adverbs such as: generalmente, a menudo, la mayoría de las veces, casi nunca, siempre.

Class structure:

Warm up:

Students are asked to think about a good/funny/interesting/bad memory they had related to a holiday and share it to the class. 

Activity:

The instructor shows some images/videos related to holidays that are celebrated in Chile  (fiestas patrias, La tirana, Semana santa, minga etc) and then other celebrations of Latin America (Inti raymi, fiesta de las flores, carnaval de barranquilla, etc). Students see images of celebrations of other countries in Latin America and ask questions about what happens in each celebration.

Students are asked to talk about the most common holidays in their country, the differences between those and the ones that were shown to them and their favorite celebrities. They will do that in pairs or groups of three, and then share to the rest of the class. 

¿Qué celebración es?: Each students is given 3 pieces of paper: an image, the description of a celebration and the name of one. Those pieces don’t match, so they have to go around walking in the room and they talk to their classmates to negotiate and exchange them, so as to match each image with the right name of celebration and its description. The only rule is that they can’t show the images or the descriptions, but they have to describe them with their own words. 

Wrap up:

Students discuss whether holidays are important and whether there is something that they would change to any of the ones that they have talked about.

Resources used: Powerpoint presentation. 

Reflection: What worked/did not work? How can it be improved?

Conversations about this topic with this class were very reflexive and there was a lot to talk about. Since they come from different cultural backgrounds, there were many things that they did, others that they did differently and students were interested to know more about their classmates’ celebrations. 

The matching images to celebration was a bit challenging but it helped students use their own words to describe celebration. They ended up learning a lot about traditions without being explicitly taught about them.

At the end of the class, there was a little bit of a not-planned debate on whether holidays were important,  since one of the participants raised the point that even though it was nice to have them, we could still live without them. At first it was going great, but then the conversation got a little bit intense among them. It was time to go anyway, so I basically thanked them for their great opinions and finished the class.