Rhoda's Kidz: A Multicultural Journey

I meet with my students twice a week in the afternoon to help them with their homework. This year the group is large and the grades are mixed (2nd to 5th grade). Their teachers have been introducing and or reviewing multiplication facts in the class. Many of my ELL students have not had a chance to learn the multiplication facts in their native language and now they are faced with  new mathematical concepts and with  a new language. Last year,because of the special needs of a similar group of students, I created the multiplication watches, something simple, practical and engaging for them to do. The students enjoyed making the watches and had fun doing the activities. They learned math facts and how to skip counting simultaneously.  Their number fluency and their ability to say the numbers in the target language have improved tremendously since we started with the watches.

Each student was given a copy of a watch of the multiplication table they were going to use. I provided them with markers and crayons. They had the opportunity to decorate their watches.

 



 I  laminated the watches and added a Velcro coin to make them stay on the student's wrist. Also, the Velcro provided for the flexibility of reusing the watches as many times as needed. 

The watches were a  complete success. The students enjoyed the activities that helped them memorize the facts. It was amazing to see the efforts my students made to learn the
facts quickly in order to be able to wear "the next number". Looking at the watches they were able to skip count and count back. Besides reinforcing their number skills needed to succeed at their grade level they became more fluent in their abilities to verbalize the name of the  numbers in English.

During the developing stages of the multiplication watches a colleague of mine came to my room and talked to me about the difficult time her son was having learning verb endings in Spanish. I mentioned to her that I was going to adapt the idea of the watch to help her son. I went to work almost immediately, excited and motivated. The -ar verb ending watch was on his wrist by the end of the afternoon.

      I have since made watches for the -ar, -er, and -ir verbs in      Spanish in the present tense.I have now posted them in my       TPT store.

The verb watches come in two shapes, square and round. There are two sets of watches with the vosotros form of the conjugated verb and without the form. Also, I included a set of watches without the English labels "Present Tense", "-AR, -ER, and _IR verbs" as a request from a friend.

The verb watches come with a variety of worksheets to practice present tense conjugations.

 The different levels in which the activities are grouped are an indication of the number of sentences per  group. The activities are the same: the variation is that Level 1 students will be expected to read, and understand 20 sentences. They have to provide the appropriate conjugation of the verbs according to the subject given, The students in the Level 2 will be required to complete only 15 of these sentence, and level 3 students will have 10 sentences to complete in the same period of time.
There are two copies of the same activity, one with the vosotros form and one without it.
The second set of activities is "Quien hace que?" (I don't know how to insert accents)
In this activity the students are asked to identify the subject pronoun since they are given the conjugated form of the verb. After they do so they must translate the sentence into English.
The last activity is "Mas Verbos". Subject pronouns are provided and the infinitive of the verbs to be conjugated. Students must write the conjugated form of the verb according to the instructions.

There is also a set to practice the preterit tense. The imperfect tense set of watches is in the process of being made.