Testimony of how my mini-lesson #1 went when I actually taught it in my class...
Side note: I did this first mini-lesson wrong for our crit lit class, but my students learned from it in spite of their air-head teacher.
I showed my students how to compare the two different type of articles in Spanish...definite and indefinite. To do this I first created a concept circle to go over the definite and indefinite articles in English.
Do you know what they are? Most English speakers do not even think about this, and most Spanish speakers do not either. In English, the definite article is 'the' and the indefinite articles are 'a/an'. In Spanish, however, there four definite articles and four indefinite articles.
After I reviewed the articles in English and taught all eight Spanish articles, I asked the students to think of other English grammatical elements that we never think of when we speak, but we must learn in school. Different classes thought of different elements, but one of the most popularly mentioned element was present and past participle. We made a concept circle to organize participles in English. This will be something that we cover in Spanish later on, so it will come back to help us in the future.
