Vamos de Compras!

Warning: This exercise will NOT be suitable for a boys school. Contains underwear.

This website is amazing awesome.

Like, I would think it was the coolest even if I wasn't trying to think of ways to make learning fun and interactive.

Seriously, check it out! There are paper doll print-outs to die for, from different eras, in different styles, in colour and in black and white to be coloured in. They gave me a fantastic idea for teaching clothing and revising colours and numbers and, as I was completing my teaching practice in a girls school at the time, I was psyched.

I mean, come on! How beautiful is this?!

Then I did a whole bunch of things wrong. I spent forever printing pages, cutting out clothes, laminating them, cutting out the laminated clothes, working out whether a dress looked like it might be silk, and writing “seda” on the back, writing “lana” on the back of others. I spent ages trying to make sure I had a good cross section of colours and items of clothing too. It took ages (and of course my inspector didn’t show for that class anyway, aint it always the way)

Ask my sister, I had her cutting out too!

Don’t do any of that. There’s no point. Sure, you have materials you can use forever, but I think your class will get so much more out of it if they do it this way instead:

1.   Teach clothes, colours, fabrics, and the questions and answers associated with shopping.

2.   Print off a whole bunch of paper doll papers from PaperthinPersonas. My personal favourites, and the ones I used, are from Marisole Monday and Friends. You can print them in colour if you want to speed things along, or in black and white if you think the class will benefit from colouring them in, or if you’re dealing with a black-and-white-only printing scenario.

3.   Give each girl one or two pages to colour and cut out carefully.

4.   Put the girls in groups of three or four and have each group “open a shop”. They get an A3 page to display their clothes, and can write the name of the shop across the top. They lay out all the clothes in their shop, write prices next to them, and they can decide things like whether they are made of cotton or leather.*

5.   Each girl still has a paper doll which she has cut out. She glues this to an A4 or copybook page, names her and writes three likes and three dislikes beside her doll.

6.   Now the class is split in two. Half the girls “go shopping” and half the girls open the shops. Each shopper is given a budget (you can useplaying cards as currency if you like).

7.   The rules are:

·        You have to buy at least one thing from your likes

·        You can’t buy anything from your dislikes

·        You can only buy something after you ask the price in Spanish

·        You can only buy something you can afford

·        Your doll must be fully dressed at the end.

8.   The shop that makes the most money is the winner.

9.   Each girl glues the new clothes onto her doll for homework, and writes a paragraph about what she is wearing.

* they could also create a little box/space in the "shop" and label it Probadores if they felt super creative.