Adventures in The First Week of School: Spanish Class
July 2022-
The first week of school can be a scary time. But the first week of Spanish Class can be a breeze! My goal in this post is to give you an overview of my lessons for the first week-ish of class in my comprehensible, acquisition driven, classroom!
First Week of Spanish 1:
Spanish 1 is always an interesting beast. In some ways it’s much easier because it’s a fresh start; but in other ways it’s 10x harder because… well… they don’t know anything. When I taught with a textbook we immediately jumped into greetings and numbers. Such an odd way to start and build a community to me. Now I do things a bit differently…
Day 1: I use these First Day Cards! Students get a card on their way in. Each chair (or seating space) has a corresponding animal on it. The students look for their animal (all cognates) and take a seat. Then they use the prompt on the back of the card to answer my “¿cómo te llamas?” question followed by “¿qué animal tienes?” Sometimes I will follow up at the end of class with “Mi animal favorito” or ¿es tu animal favorito?” depending on time. This activity gives any students that have some Spanish knowledge a chance to show it, but fully supports those that don’t. It also gives me a way to stay in Spanish 50 – 60% (or more) on the first day.
Day 2: We revisit our animals from the day before and I gather ALL my students on the floor kindergarten style and tell them a story using one of the animals. I tell the story VERY slowly, using lots of Cognates. I also ask LOTS of questions (50/50 Spanish and English) to check for comprehension. At the end of the story I have students tell me one detail from the story, one at a time, until all the details have been reviewed. At the end of class we play Yo tengo, quién tiene with Cognates.
Day 3: We revisit our animals BUT today our seats also have numbers (this is how I do my seating chart since I’m deskless and move chairs around a lot). I call names and ask them what number they have. Most students answer in English and I repeat the number in Spanish. I will repeat this for a few days to get some base with numbers. Day 3 is also when I begin my cognates activities. Today we will spend 5 minutes or so reviewing what a cognate is in Spanish. Then we will do a Cognate reading activity. This increases our time in Spanish and helps them get used to being in Spanish for all of class. (edited to add 8/22: I’m adding in La Secundaria’s Cognate Running Dictation & Doodle Drawings this year! The kids LOVE them!)
Day 4: Game Day! Today we review our reading from the day before and play Cognate Bingo. As we play, I will review these cognates with my students, again, building confidence and target language building.
Day 5: Today I like to revisit the story I told on Day 2, but go a little more in detail. Now that my students are familiar with cognates, I can give more information. I also introduce our first two words: Hay and Dice with gestures. I take some time to talk about my classroom policy with gestures & participation (no excuses) and I talk about how the week went. I like to have students point out things they noticed that helped them understand and what made it interesting. This is how I set up my success-participation expectations for the year. If theres’ time, we’ll finish out the week with Cuatro en Línea (Connect 4) with cognates.
Week 2 begins with 2 -3 days (depending on my class length) of color by word. This is HANDS DOWN one of my favorite activities. Kids learn colors and animals and have fun. See this Instagram Reel or this one for more information on how this works!
First Week of Spanish 2:
Day 1: To keep things fair, we start with the same activity from Spanish 1 Day 1, but it goes a lot faster. We then review ALL of our gestures from the year before to see what kids remember. We review the classroom success-participation expectations from the year before and I have kids set goals for the year for participation.
Day 2: Review story / One word image / story asking. Story Asking is my favorite thing, and one word image is a great pair for it. We spend all of Day 2 creating a review story using the words that they remember.
Day 3: Review activity with the story. You all know I love the class mural / gallery walk matching activity. It’s a student favorite. See this Instagram highlight for more details.
Day 4 onward: Super 7. These next few days depend a lot on what the majority of students remember. If students are struggling, I’ll do this entire Super 7 unit, if students are remembering, I’ll jump straight into Day 5 of that unit or this unit. If ALL students seem to have mastery and memory of the Super 7, we will jump into this unit and do the Super 7 verbs in the past tense as a review of the Super 7 and the past tense all at the same time.
First Week of Spanish 3:
Day 1: To keep things fair, we start with the same activity from Spanish 1 Day 1, but it goes a lot faster. We then review ALL of our gestures from the year before to see what kids remember. We review the classroom success-participation expectations from the year before and I have kids set goals for the year for participation.
Day 2: Review story / One word image / story asking. Story Asking is my favorite thing, and one word image is a great pair for it. We spend all of Day 2 creating a review story using the words that they remember.
Day 3: Review activity with the story. You all know I love the class mural / gallery walk matching activity. It’s a student favorite. See this Instagram highlight for more details.
Day 4: Last year I created a unit themed for the Olympics (or sports in Spanish) and it was a HUGE hit in my classroom. Students were so sad that we only spent a week on it. This year we will be spending at least 3 weeks on the unit and diving into all of the stories, biographies, gallery walks, etc that are included. AND having an equity based discussion on access to the games themselves & success at the games. It was a great way to remind students of expectations, present vs past tense, procedures for gallery walks / group work, etc. all while exploring exciting content.
Other things I like to work into the first week:
– FVR / Novel Speed Dating
– Garbanzo sign ups
– Señor Wooly sign ups