In my last post, I explained how I came about Diec18cho as a TV series to use with upper level Spanish courses and I want to include another disclaimer, not all parts of the series are appropriate for HS students, however, the parts to skip are pretty manageable.

One thing I also forgot to mention that I love about this show is the exposure to other languages… there is music in French, spoken Arabic and Valencian… it’s such a great reminder to students that the world is SO BEAUTIFULLY multilingual and there are so many ways to communicate. Sometimes I’m guilty of being in my Spanish/English bubble that I forget to promote multilingualism all around.

My planning schedule: I show about half an episode every Friday (there abouts), which is about 15-17 minutes each class. My classes are 45 minutes long, but I always have some warm up activity before the show. I’d like to have a re-cap activity but kids are often just asking for more of the show!

However, I want to wrap up this show by Thanksgiving (in the U.S.), so I there will be a day or two that I show an episode two days in a row.

Day 0 – 20 Minutes

Before even showing episode 1, I first shared the trailer. If I were to do this again, I probably would have had students make predictions based off of a screenshot from the trailer, but alas, I didn’t this time. However, the trailer got them quickly hooked on the story.

Then, I used screenshots (not going to share since the visuals don’t belong to me) of the characters and walked students through who each of the main characters are, using comprehensible input so everyone could follow the descriptions. I’ve included target vocab words I wanted them to be exposed to per character, without giving too much away. I chose:

• Célia (la sele, el examen pre-universitario en España, quiere ir a Canarias))
• Matías (la cárcel)
• Célia’s mother (no apoya mucho a Célia)
• Moha (un menor imigrante sin papeles, vive en un refugio/centro, de Marruecos)
• Ayoub (un amigo de Moha, también imigrante de Marruecos, vive en el centro)
• Bilal (asumido imigrante también, hace referencias a su pasado, cocinero/jefe de Moha) (I may have missed if the show confirms where he’s from)
• Sandra (trabajadora social en el centro)

I asked a few T/F comprehension questions afterwards (whiteboards are helpful to get a response from everyone). This idea of frontloading the characters and a T/F game of sorts afterwards is from Donna Tatum-John’s workshop at MittenCI 2025. She had also suggested in that workshop using a clip from the show or a screenshot during frontloading to have students make predictions, as I mentioned earlier I didn’t have time to do this, but plan to for at least other episodes. It was really that workshop that motivated me a TON to seek out a show and get kids engaged, so thanks Donna!

Day 1 – Episode 1, part 1

The first part of Episode 1 is a narration by a judge. It includes lots of helpful contextual information for the show, but happens to be linguistically pretty tough. Lots of vocab in there that I had a hunch my level 4 students would not follow, yet so important that they understand the beginning. So, I made this document (let me know if there are any errors) after transcribing the first narration. We read it aloud and then I had them work through the specific vocab matching in context. Then, they re-read it.

I made a specific point to provide as many reps as possible and to ask comprehension questions about 1) the statement regarding Célia’s lack of antecedentes (this comes up in the last episode), 2) the word delito, as it will be repeated several times in the show and what type of delito se podría considerarselo and 3) what’s the big deal about “gracias a que eres menor”? as a common theme of the show is the importance of age.

Then, I started the show. You could easily spend more time prepping for this show, but honestly, I let the excitement get the best of me. Next year, I think I’ll spend more time discussing with students 1) What’s the importance of turning 18, what will it mean for you? 2) Is there someone you’ve met who thinks completely different than you? What do you attribute that to? (Family, culture, education, geographic location, etc). We will likely end of discussing these questions along the way, but there’s lots of discussion that could be generating pre-watching the show.

Day 1, Episode 1, Part 1, was “clean” for my students in my context. I warned them of a few “lisuras/palabras malas” y “un mal dedo” (lol), but we watched from the beginning (00:00) through 16:20, where Célia, her mom and her brother are talking in prison.

It is important to note that, although it technically was only 16 minutes, I stopped pretty frequently to help them understand, by restating what happened in a comprehensible way, asking comprehension questions even as simple as, “What just happened?” or “What did he just say? – tell your partner”, and further into episodes, I am definitely asking if they thought something was the “right thing to do” or “what they would do” or, I’m in a Christian school, “What Jesus would do?”, etc etc.

They were into it from just this first part–very curious about what would happen next! We watched right up until the bell!

If you end up watching this show with your students, please let me know! I would love to collaborate with more teachers using this resource as I couldn’t find anything literally anywhere about this show so I’m kind of just trying it out as I go!