Cultures and Comparisons Assignment

Jessie Worger
10/23/2014
Level: Novice-high
Objective: Comparing holidays in the United States and in Mexico
For the class before: Have a worksheet on Halloween vocabulary and day of the dead
vocabulary.
Warmup(5 minutes): Students do a quick-write about what they do on Halloween, and
how they celebrate Halloween. Ex. Yo camino en mi vecino. Yo como dulces. Tenemos
una fiesta en nuestra clase. Yo llevo un traje. After 3 minutes of writing about their
Halloween traditions, I would have them get into pairs and share their quickwrites with a
partner. After a few minutes of that I would ask if anyone wanted to share with the class.
Activity (30 minutes):
This lesson would either be taught near Halloween or near the day of the dead. I would
find a very simple book in Spanish about someone who celebrates the day of the dead and
photo copy pages so every student would have a page. I could use a book like the one
below.

I would tie a grammar lesson into this activity by having student highlight a certain
grammatical rule in the story. For example, I would have the students highlight all of the
ser y estar and then we would co-construct the grammar rule. I would ask them what
they thought the rule for ser and estar was and what patterns that they saw. After
discussing this I would tell them the rules on the board and a few examples.
After looking at the grammar, we would read the story popcorn style. Next I would draw
on the board a big Venn-diagram and have students tell me the differences between the
day of the dead and Halloween.
On the powerpoint I would show different images of Day of the Dead traditions like the
ones below.

After showing some of the traditions of Day of the Dead, we would do a craft where we
cut images into tissue paper. The images cut into the paper would represent Day of the
Dead traditions or beliefs.
As we are creating tissue paper crafts for the Day of the Dead we would watch a video on
Youtube about the day of the dead. This video on youtube was very informational and
relevant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RRJZ9B3eC0 (Day of the Dead in
Mexico).
Closing(5 minutes):
For the end, I would have my students start on their homework which would be a cross
word puzzle about the Day of the Dead.