Fun Family Activity

This post is from my previous blog, Musings de la Maestra McH. Enjoy this classic post!

The teacher I am subbing for left a great family vocab activity that I will definitely use in the future and want to share.  We had already worked with family vocab (mom, dad, uncle, aunt, bro, sis, etc) for a couple of days so students were to the point where they could recognize most of the vocab when they saw it.  Each student received a slip of paper with something like this on it:

Yo soy Luisa Santos de Ramos, la madre de Paco y la tía de Alejandra.

I had 20-24 students in the classes.  There were 2 or 3 different family units, depending on the class size, within the papers.  Students had to walk around and 1) find their family unit, 2) figure out how they were all related and 3) draw a family tree of their family (on the white board).

Students were extremely engaged and focused.  I was honestly surprised at the level of engagement and the great teamwork I saw that went into drawing the family tree.  I was worried there might be a few students who hung back and just sat, and there were a few, but for the most part everyone was really invested.  After students drew their family trees I had them read their slips of paper one at a time and we double checked their family trees as a class.

Students had a great time seeing who was “married” and who were parents and kids of each other.  It was a great activity in which students worked with the target vocab, got to use their problem solving skills, get up and move and draw.