Learning Spanish via Loteria

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Solano County's Health and Social Services (H&SS) has a committee preparing for the Public Health Day sometime in May. I attended the first of its meetings, and I found the committee organisers to be very friendly. It did help that they prepared a check-in activity to make everyone at ease: "loteria". When they first mentioned it, I thought we would play the lotto. However, I learned that Loteria is similar to Bingo. We were each given one card with several drawings and Spanish words. We were also given a handful of beans. One had to put one bean to each drawing on the card to win the game. Players would place the beans on their cards as the game master mentioned the word or showed the photo he/she had drawn from a deck of photo cards.

 


















My Spanish is limited to numbers and a few objects... I am not able to string words into a sentence just yet. And so, I heavily relied on the photos that the game master showed to the group.

It was a fun activity, albeit short (about 10 minutes), and it definitely made us open up and become more active participants during the meeting. More importantly, it is a perfect example of applying lessons learned during one of our trainings. By checking in with the team, a leader generates the right vibe for the meeting, understands attendees' mindsets, and increases productivity during that meeting. 

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