When the wild GooseChase pays off

So many ideas are running through my head!

I was introduced to GooseChaseEDU by the wonderful Leslie Philips of our Indiana TCI collaboration group back in December. I thought that it looked interesting when Leslie told us about it, but I hadn’t gotten around to actually trying it in class.

But, Y’all. It was so much fun! My Spanish 1 class needed some motivation to start diving into Spanish, and I think this was the ticket. I’m working on a story about aches and pains and working towards Señor Wooly’s “me duele”. I introduced the structures “me duele, me siento, and me receta” I know, “Me receta” is low frequency, BUT I’m using it so that I can also teach the song “Ay Doctor” by Jesse y Joy as part of my “Cuánto me duele” story.

Anywho. I needed to review body parts, and wanted to start exposing them to different forms of the structures. So while I was circling some practice sentences to start to get a feel for the new structures, I inserted some TPR for body parts, and brain breaks. Yay backwards planning, the body parts I TPR’d are the body parts from “Me Duele” by Señor Wooly. After we finished up our practice sentences I instructed students to form no more than 5 groups (because I have the free version of GooseChase currently and it only allows 5 teams per game). Students downloaded the GooseChase app on one phone per group, and they got to it.

GooseChase has two types of Missions. Photo/Video missions where students submit a, you guessed it, photo or video to show evidence of completion, or text missions where they respond via text. I stuck with the photo/video missions. All of the missions were along the lines of “me duele la cabeza” or “No puedo caminar, me duelen las piernas”. Something that made them THINK about body parts AND see new vocab in context. Lemme tell y’all. We have some funny kids. Students had 8 missions to complete in about 20 minutes, it got pretty loud but they were having so much fun I think it was ok. With about 10 minutes or so left we went back to the prompts and reviewed all of the pictures that students submitted (btw, the pictures upload relatively quickly to the activity feed, so you can show the pictures to the students as they come in) and then I circled the phrases more. “Oh, en esta foto A Rickie le duele la cabeza, le duele la cabeza o le duelen las piernas, etc.” It was definitely a great spin on traditional PQA.  AND we reviewed the pictures by mission, picked the best one from each mission, and the team with the best/most creative/funniest picture got some extra points.

I’m going to try it with Spanish two later this week to review a legend. The prompts will be short sentences from the legend, and I’m going to ask that they re-enact the scene, though the video limit is a bit short so I’ll have to be selective with my scenes. I think this could be a nice addition to Readers Theatre.

I also think that there could be some input processing á la BVP with the prompts. Depending on WHO the subject of the prompt is could determine who takes the picture. For example, if the subject is “I” the picture should be a selfie, if it’s “we” EVERYONE in the group should be in the picture, etc. I’m not sure how one would do ‘you’ unless they had a finger pointing at someone, but they might be able to do it with a video as well.

Go try it, it’s a lot of fun, and gives a LOT of opportunities for good repetitions that include your students as the focal point of input!

Other uses in the language class:

• Preview a story (we’re previewing a legend with some of the sentences that will show up in the legend)
• Use as an activity during Embedded Reading, during one of the early (short) versions.
• Review a story (á la All the worlds a stage Scroll down a bit there’s a description)
• Students take pictures of “practice sentences” with new vocab. This gives you SO MANY opportunities to circle the structures with each groups picture. And because each picture is different, there are other things you can add in to Picture Talk each photo.