Thanksgiving, Garfield Style

This past week I tried something completely different. It was an extra-short week due to the Thanksgiving Holiday but since my students and I had two days to learn Spanish, I decided to test their auditory skills by screening a video. The idea came to me when I was watching one of my favorite holiday specials on DVD. My girlfriend and I have been watching the Garfield Holiday specials for the past few years and while we were watching the Thanksgiving Special the other day, I thought to myself, why not show this video to my class in Spanish?

The students certainly enjoyed a change of pace and it's been my own personal experience that anyone in school always enjoys a video. At first, I was going to show the video with only the Spanish dubbed over the voices, but my first eighth grade class convinced me that it would be better for them if I included the English subtitles as well. After all, they would've picked up bits and pieces here and there but without the subtitles, some would've had trouble getting the concepts presented in the video.

As the video played, I started to wonder how many of my students actually knew who Garfield was. People my age are certainly familiar with the corpulent feline but since the Thanksgiving Special aired 20 years ago, odds are some students didn't know him at all. I looked around the room during the video and noticed that most of the students were paying attention and some were even laughing at the jokes. Word got around to my other seventh and eighth graders and many were excited to be watching a video in Spanish.

After the video in a few of my classes, I asked the students to tell me about anything they had learned. One girl noticed that in the movie, the Grandma called Garfield "gatito" instead of "gato" and I explained to her that the "-ito" suffix implies an affectionate term. Instead of calling Garfield a "cat," the Grandma was calling him a "kitty." I was hoping that my classes picked up the food vocabulary from a video centered around Thanksgiving and perhaps they did, but I plan to introduce the topic of food more in depth in the coming weeks. All in all, Garfield was a success.

This week, my eighth grade students are on a week long retreat with other Catholic school students so I will be free to offer my services to the other Spanish teacher who teaches the K-6 students. I'm excited to split up the duties and teach different groups of students because I believe that two teachers can be better than one, especially when it comes to learning a foreign language. I've had a few encounters with the younger students and let's just say, I'll have to bring extra energy to keep up. I'm always ready for a challenge.