El bruto (a serious theme presented through Movie Talk)

Today I am showing an animated movie talk video with a very serious theme of domestic abuse. As always, watch the video before showing it to your own classes. Although it is an animated video, I am not going to take this lightly and joke with my classes. On the other hand, I am not going to steer clear of difficult conversations and leave my students without the ability to converse about real issues that are important to them. It is not too far-fetched to imagine that this may be the type of topic that they will eventually have to discuss on their IB or AP exams.

My target structures are regresa, el almuerzo and prueba. I start the class with my target structures written on the board and I’ll do a little gesturing and PQA to get these words in their heads. I am doing this with Spanish 1 today, but I can easily imagine scaling up the narration for higher levels.

Before watching the video we will examine the pictures of the main characters  in this power point (click here to download) . We discuss what each one looks like and who we think they are before viewing the video. I am recycling the phrase sin pelo… I purposely did not write calvo because I want my students to hear the word sin more.

The video is located on youtube and does have one phrase written in English (“Out to lunch”), but otherwise it is language neutral. It will probably take us the rest of the period to narrate everything that happens in the video, slowly, writing any out of bounds vocabulary on the whiteboard.

The next day we will read this reading together in pairs and they will translate it. The reading describes the first third of the video. After they have completed the reading I will give them the choice to either write the rest of the story on the back of the paper or to create a new ending.