Reflecting...

...this post is all about being a reflective teacher... especially when things go wrong.
This week, I tried a new thing. I don't think it as best as it could have...It was my first attempt to a breakout activity. I have designed the four puzzles to do in 60 min; the ideas are good, the kids managed most of the tasks and understood what they had to do quickly. The gap between what I thought they would manage and what they did manage was the issue I think on one particular task. I have to mention that I allowed the student the use of the dictionary to support them. 

The first task was a paragraph to put back together, each paragraph has a different color and the code element for the breakout is the 6th paragraph color. 
Theoretically a pretty good puzzle, but here is the catch I wrote the text a while ago which what the kids would have covered in mind and yet, they still had difficulty figuring the order of the text because I think it was too long. Also when one of the kids tried to use purple on the padlock... it wasn't here! 
So here is the reflection I'm still thinking the long reading is certainly an exercise I want them to do but I will give them a little bit more guidance, including that the 6th paragraph is not purple and that they it would be most logical to start with the part in the present tense. 

The second task went very well with the kids who knew their vocabulary. It is a version of  la palabra oculta and they have a series of code cracking to do :
1. find the word for the picture all  these combined will reveal a word we studied in the unit
2. they have to find a certain letter from each word, these combine make the code breaking word and the 3 rd letter is the letter to use in the padlock.
I think this went well for two reasons. My kids are used to working with visual cues, this was broken into smaller peces so more manageable as a group too. 

The third task worked well too it was a crossword puzzled designed to be done on the computer ( www. languageapps.org) and again the clues I used were things we had worked on , either vocabulary or conjugations from this chapter. The clues were in Spanish and the kids needed very little help on that one.  

The forth one was also something my students were used to. It was of course a very different version. they have had puzzles before this one is a nonagon ,9 sided shape, and the work they had to do was to match a verb and the tense with the conjugated form that corresponded. The only hard pieces on this one were the fue, which could be either ser or ir,  and the nosotros -ar and -ir verbs  which could be either present or preterit. To me it is important that the kids have something to think about when they are doing these puzzles. The pieces have various colors and the final clue is a certain piece's color. 

Out of the 6 groups I had working on the tasks as they were, one finished 10 mn before the 60 mn was up and had three trials and broke the code. another two groups came very close to finishing the tasks. 



Second time around with a different class, smaller in size so  students worked in pairs this time, much better, the kids were really into it and the code was found and the candy was had. Also it was clear that these students paid more attention to the puzzle as they noticed that two verbs were repeated, so they are now all different and I am going to take a break form puzzle making!!