La telenovela: Guión y video (IMS)

This trimester, the students in Español Intermedio Middle School were hard at work! They finished reading the book Quince, learned how to express events in the past using the preterite tense, and finished their telenovela project!

For their telenovela project they worked on three main tasks:

they wrote a timeline in which they included the major events of their story.
they chose one event to write a script for one scene, using script-writing conventions.
they voted on a scene, from the three written, to film and edit it.

Because they were thinking of the events in their timelines as actions happening in the past, they used the preterite tense. However, for their scripts, they had to use a variety of verbs (regular, irregular, reflexives, and verbs similar to “gustar“), both in the present and the preterite tense to include dialogue, narration, and description. In order to give accurate formatting to their scripts, we looked at two different examples, one from a film writer’s workshop and another from a scene of the Mexican telenovela Quinceañera (1987).

Before writing their scripts, students saw another clip (from 0:19-0:33, above) from the telenovela Quinceañera (1987) and read through the script for the scene.