Episode 76: Legends

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Transcript

Welcome!

Welcome back to teaching la vida loca, the podcast you come to for short and sweet and sometimes spicy episodes full of enthusiasm, magic, and tips and tricks for your classroom. I'm Annabelle, your maestra loca, and I'm here to bring you inspiration, unapologetic authenticity, and ideas to spark more joy in your teaching journey. I'm turning up the excitement and elated to have you right here with me. I'm not just your host, I'm your cheerleader, and I'm thrilled you're tuning in. So, let's do this. Let's tackle teaching la vida loca together. Hi there. Welcome to Episode 76 of teaching la vida loca. I am so excited you are here. And this is an episode that was inspired by a one-on-one coaching session I had last week with Julie, and I am excited to talk about how you can use legends to teach culture in the target language, even in your lowest levels today. 

Coaching is open!

But before I do that, I want to talk to you about my coaching sessions, since I have those available. And it is not very often that I get to say that I have one on one coaching spots, and I'm starting two new cohorts of group coaching this month as well. So let me tell you about that. The first the one-on-one sessions, I have 30-minute sessions and hour-long sessions available, and then just be you and me on Zoom, I'd send you the notes page and the recording afterwards. I love one on one coaching. I love being able to get to know you on a deeper level. It's awesome. And I also am obsessed with, and I know that if you've been following me, you know this, I'm obsessed with group coaching, so I created a beginner cohort. So, if you're new to acquisition driven instruction, and I have an intermediate and advanced cohort for people who have been using acquisition driven instruction for a longer amount of time. We do group coaching monthly in La Familia loca PLC. And the way it works is you show up with your questions, you get to ask your questions, and you get to hear the questions of others answered, and you realize that you had other questions you didn't even realize you wanted to ask. It's also powerful, because I am always giving my feedback based on my experience and my time in the classroom, but there are other experts, i.e., you in the meeting, and you often have other ideas and other ways to contribute to the questions that are raised by other people. So, it's really, powerful. It's at a great price, and because you listen to my podcast, you can get 10% off if you just use the coupon podcast for either of the group coaching sessions, it'll give you 10% off. And those are at three different times, because I like to vary the times, just so that it gives everybody an opportunity to participate. If I make everything on Tuesdays, there might be people who can't do it. So, there are three different sessions, October, November, and December, different days of the week and different times. I encourage you to check those out. I'm really, really excited for the group coaching offers. And again, it's at a price that you know you really can't beat. I'm really, really excited about it. So, check those out. Use the coupon podcast. Thank you for listening, and I'm so excited. And they are limited. That's the last thing too. I'm limiting them to 12 people per cohort so that we can be intentional about our time and that everybody in the cohort can get their questions answered each meeting that feels important, and it'll be recorded too. So that's that, excited come and join me and others for group coaching, or if you want someone on one time with me, I'll answer it. I'll put all those details in the show notes. 

Legends

But back to this episode, I'm excited. It was in a one-on-one session last week that I got this idea to talk about legends in the target language, because I had a teacher ask specifically, how I can dig deep into culture early on with my novices, and I immediately was like, legends. Have you ever taught with legends? Legends are such an easy way to expose students to rich culture because legends are so often what different cultures put. I mean, you can learn so much about a culture and a group of peoples based on the legends that they teach, or the legends that they have in their society, because they carry such cultural significance, and it reveals, like societal values, societal fears. They're so accessible and engaging because students are, you know, into Legends themselves. Usually, I don't I've never really dug deep into Legends, younger than third grade, to be honest, but you could. You might just need to not focus on the spooky ones. But fourth grade and up, they like the spooky. They want to learn about it. And I absolutely love using them to teach about various cultures and global cultures too, which is really, cool. 

Legends in Lower Levels  

So today I want to talk to you about using legends, even in your lower levels, to bring in rich culture for your students. I think the first thing that you need to focus on is how you're doing it with high frequency verbs. Now, by this time of the year, if you've been teaching with acquisition driven instruction, you probably have a good little base of high frequency verbs. And all you must think about is like you're going to be using ser and a star like to be verbs tener, which is, like to have a ser to do or make, is a great verb with legends. And then you can look, use the word like, see, hear, and go. There's so many of these high frequency words that could be used in the story writing of the legends. And you can keep it really, simple at first, literally, when I think about my legend, I have several resources posted on my TPT to teach Chupacabra’s legend, to teach the loogaroo legend. The loogaroo is a werewolf. And I started years ago by teaching the Chupacabra’s lesson, because I wanted to introduce students to this. It's my favorite. We believed that we had a Chupacabra in Leadville when I was growing up in Leadville, Colorado, and it's this mysterious creature from Latin America, and it drains animals of their blood. And I knew that I could say lives. I could tell the story of me. I could do a story listening activity of me growing up, and what I heard overnight, and attack is a cognate. And so, the animals, you know, people woke up, and the animals were all drained of all their blood. And obviously, you don't use drained, but it was such an easy way to introduce kids to this legend, and they were so bought in and so engaged, just because that's the nature of teaching legends, right? So, I taught the Chupacabra’s legend, and then one of my kids said, oh, it sounds just like the Rougarou, and they use the R Rougarou. That's because I'm here in Louisiana, and there's the French Cajun legend from the loogaroo transformed into the Rougarou, which lives in the swamps. And this child was like, oh, my grandma used to tell me stories about the Rougarou. And then another kid said, Oh, me too. And so, I was like, Okay, done. Went home that night and wrote a whole mini unit on the Rougarou, and then taught that, and then we did this cool comparison between the two legends. And so, I had, like, literally, two weeks’ worth of content just on teaching about these two legends, and I did it all in the target language, all with my novice levels. But again, their engagement was so high because legends are compelling in and of themselves, right? Another legend that I love to teach about that I'm working on getting my resources up on TpT for, and hopefully I will in the next week or so for you, is the Kukui or the kuku, and this is like a boogeyman, and some people say that he has a head, again, you can see where the high frequency language comes in. Has a head of a pumpkin. But others say that he can transform into whatever your greatest fear is. So, parents often used them in Mexico to scare kids into going to sleep. But isn't that interesting that so many cultures use, like, scary legends to scare kids into sleeping, when really, it's like you'd think and do the opposite, like that'd be terrifying to go to sleep and then dream about this thing. But I love teaching about the Kukui, and one of the things that I do at the end of that unit is have kids create their own Kukui, and it's powerful, and it's a fun final assessment and opportunity for students to use writing to output. 

More Legends! 

But there's so many legends around the world that I think you can, you can teach about and, and, I mean, there's, I mean I spent so much time researching to be able to teach about others, and just some of the ones that I've used before. The Anansi is a legend from Ghana and West Africa, and it's like a trickster figure that looks like, small. It's like a spider, but uses like, even though they are weak, or look weak, they are super cunning, and do things to like, deceive people. And it's like a trickster, like a trickster legend, which is super cool to teach about. There are also stories of the Anansi in in the Caribbean because of the enslaved peoples bringing those stories over from West Africa. And then another one that I taught about once, and it was when it was a couple years ago when anime started to blow up again and students started to become really obsessed with Japanese culture. The Kitsune is a legend of a of a fox, which is very related to Naruto. If you are a Naruto fan, or if you have students who are Naruto fans, the Kitsune is a fox that can transform into usually female figures. And there's both good and trickster malicious stories of the Kitsune, but there's so many stories of both of those legends, again, that are global cultures. It's so cool to be able to wrap all of those into our classes. 

Think About…

So, what I want you to do is just push yourself to think about, okay, what high frequency words have I introduced so far this year? How can I use those to talk about a legend, whatever legend you want, pick your favorite, and think about what structures do you already have those kids know, that you can use to speak in very basic language about that legend, and then you just pair it with pictures? If this feels super new and overwhelming to you, then I encourage you to go and check out the resources I have on TPT, and hopefully I finished the Kukui one soon. But I think that if you sit down and think about okay, I have lives okay, I could talk about where the legend lives, or the people that live in that area. I that my students have has and likes. What does the legend like? You can describe its features with has or with the verbs to be right? What Can I introduce tien miedo is scared, because if you already have had, then adding in that, like fear is a great way to introduce that verb? This is a perfect season for it, right? I just encourage you to dive into using legends to teach culture. I think you're going to love it, plus, it's a great way to fight that fall funk. You know, we're very much in that season of where we're over the honeymoon period, and classroom management starts to get a little bit trickier. Everything feels a little bit more challenging. So, if we can incorporate something that's naturally compelling, like legends in our classroom, we're far more likely to get that engagement that we want so bad, and that October slump is exactly why I've opened all these coaching sessions. So come and get some inspiration. I'd love to see you there. Okay, that's all for today. I really hope that you can explore some of these legends and use some of the moral lessons and to teach about the cultural values of different societies and different peoples and do it during spooky season. It's the best time of year. Oh, I'm so obsessed. Okay, I love you, and until next time, you'll be teaching the la vida loca, and I will be supporting you, and I love you so very much. Take care.