Valentine’s Madness

I have long admired Dustin William’s Music Madness idea.  Even though he’s generously shared his brackets (as have others!), I just haven’t been able to execute it in my own classroom.  Perhaps it’s because it’s been so long since I’ve played basketball so I forget that the time is sneaking up on me or perhaps it’s because my classes were only 45 minutes and I couldn’t justify spending that much time on music for that long.  However, this past Christmas Dustin shared his Navidad TV Commercial Madness and I thought this was something I could get behind!  I’ve always wanted to use more commercials in my classroom and even though commercials are shorter than songs I also have more times with block scheduling this year.  Valentine’s Day seemed like the perfect time to try it out!

Valentine’s Madness | Shared by Elizabeth Dentlinger at SraDentlinger.wordpress.com

I have put together everything for the Valentine’s bracket in this Google Slide.  (On a quick side note: I’ve realized Google Slides is the Google version of Microsoft’s Publisher.  It’s much easier to manipulate Slides with visuals than in Google Docs, and it also allows me to easily share with others as it’s part of Google).  ¡Muchas gracias a Nelly Hughes por su ayuda con los textos!   Two commercials are kind of generic Valentine’s commercials, while two others had some target language specific Valentine’s phrases (príncipe azul and media naranja).  Most of the vocabulary they’re listening for was Valentinesy in nature and mostly nouns.  My bracket is different from Dustin’s in the fact that: (1) I only have four commercials because I wanted to complete this the week before Valentine’s Day; (2) we worked with one commercial each day; (3) we voted after we had worked with two using a Google Form.

One issue I ran into in the beginning: I had students fill out their bracket predictions before watching as someone would with a bracket, but we ran into issues because students knew absolutely nothing about the commercials.  All they had was the title on Slide 1.  Next year, I plan to use Slide 2 with the four images and one important, all-encompassing line to help them make their guesses.

Day 1 – Comercial (Claro – San Valentín) con Manny Cruz.  We listened to it, I read aloud as they filled in their answers afterwards, they made predictions about what the commercial might be for and then we watched the commercial.

Day 2 – Cerveza Andes  – Hombre perfecto.  Before working with this commercial, we studied El Príncipe Azul with this presentation.  Students REALLY got into this!  We made a list of (physical, personalities, possession) qualities students thought prince charming should have on the whiteboard and then looked at some non-traditional Disney princes… and then our principal!  What a hoot!  We listened to the commercial, I read aloud as they filled in their answers afterwards, they made predictions (kind of easy w/cerveza in the company’s name!) about what the commercial might be for and then we watched the commercial.  We then did the extra activities on Slide 8 on the next day followed by voting between these two commercials.  

Day 3 – Feliz Día de San Valentín – Andrés Guardado declara su Amor – Funny Valentine’s Videos!  We listened to the commercial, I read aloud as they filled in their answers afterwards, they made predictions (kind of easy w/cerveza in the company’s name!) about what the commercial might be for and then we watched the commercial.

Day 4 – Publicidad BAGGIO – Día de los Enamorados 2017.  This one was quick and dirty because we had speaking tests this day.  We briefly talked about media naranja and then listened to the commercial twice, made our predictions, and then watched.  They quickly voted after.  In the future, I would love to explore the media naranja like I did Príncipe Azul.  

Although this was a lot of work, I think this might be my new favorite activity!  I love that students are listening to native speakers and not just in music, I love that they have a central theme, and I also love that they got to analyze how romantic the video and texts were.  I would like to improve this last part so they’re evaluating more specific things, but I also think this was a good place to start for them.

¡Feliz día de San Valentín a todos!