I hate them....object pronouns that is. Teaching them has always proven to be quite a task and this year was no different. The textbook series we use teaches Direct Object Pronouns in Spanish I, but last year we never got to them. Rather than teaching Direct Object Pronouns, teaching ton of other material, and then teaching Indirect Object Pronouns, I decided to mold my latest chapter around both of the object pronouns.
In years past, I was able to get through Direct Object pronouns relatively quickly. This year was not the same as any other year. I think I spent two weeks or more on the concept. Knowing that I am very far behind compared to other years, I didn't want to spend that long on Indirect Object Pronouns. I wound up having to teach much more in English than I wanted, and using way too many English examples for my liking, but it was the only thing that seemed to work this year. Some years are more difficult than others and this is one of my most difficult in terms of achievement (figures, it's the year the state has implemented SGO's and will be monitoring my students progress more than before...oh well.).
Something I found that worked for me was this sentence construction game I played with my classes. Warning, it is a more of a translation based activity, but as I said before, that's what worked for me this time around. Students were given a list of sentences in English with indirect objects and they had cards in Spanish and all they had to do was create a sentence for each of the English sentences with an Indirect Object Pronoun. Believe it or not, this did prove to be a challenge but it was one most of my students were able to conquer. If you'd like to see if your students are up to the challenge, I'm offering the activity at a discounted price on Teachers Pay Teachers for a limited time. Just click the image below and enjoy!
If you've had any success with teaching Direct or Indirect Object Pronouns, I'd love to know what you did, so please share in the comments below.
One activity I really like and seems to work well is sentence pieces. I like these because it keeps all the kids busy at the same time. I make up a bunch of different sentences, in Spanish, on Word in a big font. Then I copy them on cardstock and cut out each word and place each sentence in a plastic baggie. This is of course after we have introduced and done some collective practice. Then I pass out a baggie to each student (yes some sentences are the same but sometimes I divide the class and number the baggies like 1-15). Then they have to spread out the word pieces and put the sentence together. I walk around and its a great opportunity to say "Okay this piece is in the wrong place...where should the person go?" And then I move the piece or have them move the piece physically. It seems to really help. You could do it with direct objects as well.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing I like is color coding the pieces, blue for subject, green for verb, etc. I know it is grammatical and sometimes complex but I think it really helps for them to see over and over again the order of those types of sentences.
Hi Jayci! Thank you so much for your comment. Your ideas are great and I've done that activity as well. Sometimes the more grammatical activities tend to be the ones to cause the lightbulb to go off in our students' minds. :)
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