Using Scrambled Sentences to Improve Confidence with Spanish Reading and Fluency

We all have had to sacrifice and pivot during COVID. One of the sacrifices that my family has had to make has been not traveling. We have not been to Spain in over two years. The lack of immersion has affected my boys' level of Spanish in a significant way--especially for my 6 year old who, pre-COVID, did not have any formal education in Spanish.

As things are slowly getting "back to normal" for us, we enrolled our boys in Spanish classes for the school year. However, they, like many of their classmates, have seen their Spanish skills drop over the last couple of years.

Last week, my youngest son was quarantined at home for 10 days due to being a close contact for someone who tested positive for COVID. We were sent a couple of school packets home and had a few ZOOM classes throughout the week, but there was a lot of down time for sure.

I decided to take out some Thanksgiving themed Spanish worksheets. They had scrambled sentences where he had to cut out the words and form a coherent sentence with them. 

The worksheets had 2 different levels:

• the simpler level asked the student to copy the sentence that was written 

• and the higher level simply provided the words and the student had to create their own sentence.

Do you know that my son was able to do the higher level--and asked for more??? 

He had such a great time cutting and pasting, 

figuring out how to form a coherent sentence (often looking for clues like punctuation and capital letters),

and writing his sentences.

More importantly, it was a quick activity that helped him gain so much confidence with his reading skills.  

He was so excited about learning to read in Spanish that he picked up a few Spanish picture books and tried to read them as well! #winning