SpinTX to the Rescue
During my intermediate Spanish class last Friday we got through the material somewhat faster than I was anticipating. We were going back over the subjunctive and its different uses (our textbook discusses 6). Anyway, we were finished with the material with about 15 minutes left to go from our 2-hour class so I had to think fast. I told my students to go to SpinTX and look up two real-life uses of the subjunctive that illustrate two of the six different uses of the subjunctive that we had discussed, and that they could leave as soon as their group showed me their examples and told me which functions they illustrated. Needless to say my students jumped right in! While I watched them work I was very pleased to see them having good discussions about how the subjunctive was being used on the site. They had absolutely no difficulty in using the site, and each of their identified uses were spot on. The first group finished after about eight minutes and the last group was almost finished when class officially ended. I felt that this was a very successful activity at exposing them to the subjunctive and they were happy to have the chance to leave early, so it was a nice win-win. I will very probably do this again if I’m ever stuck with 15 or so minutes left at the end of a class.