In this unit, students look at homes around the world and how people live. This unit is a wonderful unit that exposes my students to life outside of their town. I love teaching this unit because students carefully consider their lifestyles and the privileges that they have growing up in the United States. I adapted the activities from this unit based on content that Carrie Toth shared on her blog, SomewheretoShare.com, and have added materials to best suit the needs of my students as well as to challenge them in their language skills. Students become very engaged with this unit, and this unit is very technology friendly. Students are able to use the internet to connect to the outside world in a meaningful way. This is the first unit in Spanish II where students begin to look at global challenges and begin to discuss their feelings and opinions. I really enjoy this unit for the language goals but also the connections that are built in class while working through this content together. The first year I taught this unit, I only used the pictures provided to discuss homes and living conditions. However, the following year, I really wanted to dig in deep to the content and found a lot of resources online to supplement the vocabulary. In the last two years, I have slowly added resources to this unit to not only explore living situations, but also what people eat and how they utilize transportation. Students always comment that this unit is their favorite that we do all year, and it is mine as well. I really like how students are able to connect to the world around them with this unit. This unit also prepares students to discuss cultural living differences for the novel unit that follows this chapter. I am always finding new resources or updated content to add to this unit. In the future, I would like to find videos or personal commentary on living situations for students to have more exposure to native speakers using Spanish.
