If you are able to get your hands on a copy of this workbook, turn to page 63.  Located there is what I think is a fabulous activity for critical thinking and metacognition, as well as vocabulary review and grammar practice.  The activity reviews the preterit, and asks students to consider various cause and effect scenarios. Using the preterit, and previously-learned vocabulary, students have to think of what resulted in the stated outcome.  For example, the first scenario states the following: El cuarto de Alicia está limpio y ordenado. Translation: Alicia’s bedroom is clean and orderly.

I presented three of the five scenarios listed to my Twosies, including the aforementioned scenario, one by one. With each scenario, the students wrote sentences in Spanish to provide causes or reasons.  Although they required a bit of scaffolding with the first scenario, they were well on their way by the time we arrived at the third.  They saw it as a sort of competition, and tried to out-do each other, i.e. who could compose the most reasons or causes for a given scenario.

Here is a sampling of what my Twosies wrote for the scenario involving Alicia.  These were in Spanish:

1.  She picked the dirty clothes off the floor and put them in the laundry.

2.  She did her laundry and made her bed.

3.  She put her clothes and books in the cabinet.

4.  She put her clothes in the closet.

5.  She picked the clothes up off the floor because she couldn’t walk around the room.

Tomorrow, I plan to use the activity with my other class of Twosies.