Using Puppets in Daily Routine

I was concerned when a parent told me that they asked their child a basic Spanish question and the child had no idea how to respond. It was troubling because in our class that student was able to understand and respond when I assessed that question. What I noticed was that sometimes vocabulary is easier to remember than conversational phrases. This probably has to do more with the number of words it takes to construct a question and response, but also because I only spent a lesson teaching the phrases rather than building them into our daily routine.

I decided to use puppets to start to incorporate conversational Spanish into the classroom. The puppets are fun (surprisingly even for the older students) thus students are not bored after practicing the same sets of phrases. I really like animal puppets and occupation related puppets, because their names can be the names of the animals or occupations (hence doubling up on vocabulary.)

Barbara Cleary has a great blog post about using puppets as an engagement strategy in grades K-5

I have just started practicing this but I have found it to be really successful thus far. Students practice asking a new puppet every class ¿Cómo te llamas? and the puppet responds. We have reached 5 different questions and responses thus far. 

Questions used:
¿Cómo te llamas? 
¿Cómo estás? 
¿Cuantos años tienes?
¿De donde eres?
¿Te gusta___ ?


Examples:
Class Says: ¿Cómo te llamas? 
Frog Puppet Says: Me Llamo Sapo, y tu? (pointing to a specific student)
Student Responses: Me llamo....
Frog Puppet Says:  ¿y tu, cómo te llamas? (pointing to different student)
(after all students have gotten a chance to say their name)
Teacher Says: Let's ask Sapo how he feels
Class Says: ¿Cómo estás? 
Frog Puppet Says: Estoy triste
Class Says: ¿Por qué?
Frog Puppet Says:  Porque no se cuantos años tienen
(Frog Puppet then asks each student their age)

It can take a long time to ask each student so I would build the questions up 1 question per class, since you still have a whole other lesson to focus on. As students become increasingly comfortable answering these questions, have the puppet say he is sad because he doesn't know anything about you. Then have the puppet ask students randomly any of the 5 questions. 


Practicing these questions can also happen in a "talk and turn". You can do it any number of ways, but the important thing is to mix up whether the students are just responding to questions and when they get a chance to actually ask the questions. The more exposure they get to these basic questions the better. Anyone who knows these children are learning Spanish are bound to ask them one of these questions. If you have any other questions you suggest teaching please comment!