In Spanish III we are getting ready to start reading Fiesta Fatal. In the novel, the main character, Vanesa, and her mother must flee from the cartel. In order to understand the urgency and fear they feel, I am front loading some information about Mexican cartels. Using CI and CALP methods, the plan is to take four days to teach the topic. Day 1: Gallery Walk After posting these pictures around the room, pairs of students walked together, discussed the images and wrote their observations. Once pairs had a few observations written, we discussed them as a class (following the method explained here by Tina Hargaden, around the 6 minute mark). As a class, we wrote down the observations, questions that arose via discussion and any predictions students had. Day 2: Information Flood Students again worked in partner groups. Each pair was given an article to read relating to cartels. (There were five different articles.) Students read their assigned article together with the purpose of pulling 5 pieces of information from the article. It is important to stress to students to focus on what they KNOW and not what they don’t. Some of these article were far above their proficiency level, but all still managed to get a main idea with a few details because I stressed that they did not need to understand every word and focus instead on what they could figure out. After each pair recorded five pieces of information, students formed jigsaw groups and shared what they had written down. (Jigsaw Groups: Student A in each pair became #1, Student B became #2; all #1 formed a group and all #2 formed a group.) Once each member shared their 5 pieces of information, they collectively chose the 5 most important facts about cartels. It is important that they choose the 5 facts, as this helps to reinforce small group discussion skills as well as critical thinking skills. In other words, I did not direct them to choose 1 fact from each article, students had to think critically and work together to find 5 facts that they determined were the most important. The "new" top five pieces of information were then shared out with the large group and discussed as to why each group chose accordingly. Day 3: Input Chart I presented an input chart based on information primarily from a BBC article. Using comprehensible input, I told students about the various cartels in Mexico and the territory they currently control. I talked specifically about the two largest cartels - Sinaloa and Jalisco Nueva Generación. I also talked about the deaths/killings related to cartels (stats only, I did not go into detail about specific murders). I wrapped everything up with what the cartels traffic into the U.S. and why the market is so large - U.S. demand. Day 4: Cooperative Paragraph Finally, to tie everything together, we created a cooperative paragraph (or two) based on what we learned about Mexican cartels. The information came from observations from the Gallery Walk, the collected information from the articles and the Input Chart. As an assessment, students read this article. I adapted it slightly to make it a bit more comprehensible. They also completed an an interpretive reading assessment based on the article. If you are looking to expand your unit on Mexican cartels, or are looking for some different options, Kara Jacobs has a large unit built around music, narcocorridos to be exact. Carrie Toth has students watch a National Geographic video and follow up by creating infographs.
1 Comment
Kara Jacobs
12/6/2017 04:55:16 pm
This is fantastic! Thanks for sharing this approach!
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Jessie Oelke
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