Lovett School issued the following announcement on Mar. 11.
Game days are the best. We have all played Kahoot, Jeopardy, or board games for review, and they’re a nice change of pace from the traditional work that we have to do.
In Sra. Mitchell’s Honors Spanish III Class, students just learned about the subjunctive tense, a tense that Sra. Mitchell says is not present in English. “The subjunctive tense is a tense that we use a lot,” she explained to me. “As a native, I used the subjunctive tense more than any other tense.”
The subjunctive tense is a tense that has to do with things that you wish or hope will happen. “It’s part of my culture,” Sra. Mitchell says. “This is how we live every day - waiting and hoping for something good.”
Students learned about sentences in the subjunctive that have noun clauses and subjunctive clauses. Sra. Mitchell showed her student a formula, which helps them correctly write the sentences. The keyword in the sentence is the word in the middle, “que”, which lets you know that the verb in the subjunctive clause should be conjugated in the subjunctive tense. There are other triggers, too. There are also 9 rules for the tense. “It’s very difficult to learn because there are 9 rules. It has more rules than any other tense,” Sra. Mitchell told me.
Knowing that this tense would be difficult for students to understand, Sra. Mitchell decided to have her students create games in order to help them learn and understand the subjunctive tense better. “For me, this year was the first year that I tried games, and it was extremely important because through playing you can learn,” Sra. Mitchell said.
According to her, students tend to have trouble with this tense, probably because we don’t have one like it in English. “We need to start teaching students at Spanish 2 because they need to use it a lot at AP. They’ll really know how to speak Spanish if they learn the subjunctive,” Sra. Mitchell told me.
The games aren’t only helpful for students to learn the subjunctive in the future, but also for lesson four, which is when students will learn how to use the subjunctive with adjective clauses. “Games can help us to recycle the information that we learned previously in lesson 3,” Sra. Mitchell explained.
Students split up into groups and began designing the perfect game to help them learn and understand the subjunctive. There was Jepordary, Candy Crush, and other board games. Sra Mitchell was proud of her students’ effort saying, “I saw all of my students put in a lot of time and effort to see how they can put the 9 rules into one game.”
Original source can be found here.
Source: Lovett School
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