Nailed It! Mexico: A mini-unit comprehensible for novices

I just finished Brandon Brown versus Yucatan with my sixth graders.  We have one week before break.  I wanted to create a small unit around either a movie or a TV show, but I couldn’t decide what.  If I put the captions on in English, they won’t gain much from the movie.  Plus, I don’t have enough time to really stretch out a movie and make it comprehensible for them.  However, I remembered Nailed It! Mexico!  It is short (under 30 minutes.)  Therefore, I can talk about it enough to make it comprehensible in our four days.  Plus, much of the parts rely on the visual aspects of the show instead of the dialogue.  This is important!  With novices, I like shows that have short scenes, so I can easily pause and talk or shows that do not rely heavily on dialogue.  Over the years, I have learned a lot from working with Kara Jacobs on how to make any show, song or movie comprehensible.  My favorite ideas that I have learned from Kara include:

On the student sheets, I have broken down the main events into comprehensible sentences that students must complete.  This helps them understand what is going on even more as well as check for understanding.  It also breaks up the action and allows students to ask questions without going too far.

I personally like to find my repetition through activities.  This way, it breaks up my input with more student involvement.  Some of my favorite reinforcement activities include:

(If you are looking for more information on the papelitos game, I play it this way. If you are looking for write, draw, pass, I play it this way.  If you have an extra day, you can always use one of these ideas to extend the lessons!)

Finally for Nailed It Mexico, there are a few aspects of culture that I can include.  The judge has a whole cake store with classes as well.  Students are going to complete a webquest.  Since the theme is birthday, we are going to listen to the song Las Mañanitas.  The last challenge involves a quinceañera tres leches cake.  We will watch a video of parts of a quinceañera to discuss it and also a video about how to make a tres leches cake.

I wrote down all of my lesson plans for the mini-unit here (episode 1 season 1) and the student sheets here.  I hope these lessons can help you next week or to ease in after break!  If you end up using them, tag me and let me know how they went.

A few edits to make some of this virtual: I made an EdPuzzle of the tres leches cake video. I made a Kahoot out of the papelitos game to do virtually.