Semester Exams for All Levels

It’s officially December! The year is wrapping up and so is the first semester of our language classes. If your school is anything like mine, we give end of semester exams. There are a lot of different ways you can go about giving exams. For me, I prefer to give projects whenever possible. 

Don’t get me wrong, there is NOTHING wrong with giving a traditional assessment. For my school, we are given 1.5 hours to give our exam and I do not agree with giving an assessment that is longer than it needs to be. Giving an 100 question exam just for the purpose of filling time doesn’t sit right with me. And, nothing sounds worse than having to keep kids entertained for an hour or so after an exam right before Christmas break! I can tell you that not a single teacher will be moving on with content after the exam, no one will be teaching, and not a single student is in the mindset of wanting to learn. They are ready for break and so are we. 

So, why projects? Well, for one it can be about anything and doesn’t have to be summative of the entire semester. I love giving semester exam novel projects and I love doing gallery walk style presentations like I wrote about in my ACTFL 2023 post! I also gave some examples of some project-based learning assessments last year when I taught La Piñata de Renata. You can read about it here! This post will walk you through some of my options I am choosing from this year and will also highlight something brand new in my store. 

Semester Exam Project Ideas for all levels

Novel Wrapped

Ever heard of Spotify Wrapped? Yeah, I thought so. Well, I got this idea to take the Spotify Wrapped concept and turn it into a novel project! The templates are already made for learners to reflect on a novel that they have read. 

Consider doing this as a project that you do throughout the entire book that learners update as they go. You can also incorporate a presentational speaking aspect and ask learners to present about specific chapters or components of the book. 

There are blank slides that will allow you to create your own tasks for learners to do. It is the perfect semester exam option for Gen Z!

To increase the level of complexity, ask Level 2+ learners to compare two novels together and provide more opinion-based thoughts that require more complex language and vocabulary. 

Like I mentioned above, this blog post is packed full of great ideas to eliminate a traditional assessment. I love the Instagram feed project the most for Novice learners and the Story Rewrite for Novice High – Intermediate learners. 

These are mostly novel-based assessments as well but you most definitely could use a short story or even a co-created story to complete these. 

FVR Wrapped

I promise you are not seeing double. I made a separate version of the Spotify Wrapped novel project just for FVR! 

If your learners have been doing FVR since September, they most likely have read quite a few novels by December if you do FVR often! If you don’t this may not be the choice for you. 

Learners will rate their top 5 FVR books, summarize their favorite novel, identify their favorite book genre, and more! This is a great semester exam option to hold them accountable for what they are reading in class. 

There are also blank templates at the end of the presentation so you can create your own activities that best suit your learners. 

You can grab this project here, or grab my novel project growing bundle here!

 

Here are a few more semester exam project ideas that can work for any level that do not include novels. 

  •  Create a trading card of a famous hispanic who has made an impact in the world, or even your community if possible!
    •  You can turn this into a presentational and listening activity by asking learners to record their presentations and then having other learners listen to each other present and take notes about what they learned. Thank you to Heidi Trude for teaching me about this! 
  • Ask Intermediate learners to find an authentic article to read in the TL. Then, ask them to create a comprehension activity for someone else in the class to complete. 
  • Learners can co-create a story together using target vocabulary words from the semester. If time allows, ask learners to share their story by doing an authors chair time during the allotted midterm time slot.
    • Ask other learners to listen and draw images that represent what they heard. Or, ask learners to do blind retells of someone else’s story. 
  •  Do a wax museum project to focus on presentational speaking skills. 
 
What other ideas for a project do you have? Send me a DM or comment on this post to add your ideas here!