Back to School Unit & Lesson Planning for the First Month of French, Spanish, & Italian Class
Back to School is right around the corner, and if you’re teaching a French 1, Spanish 1, Italian 1, or Exploratory World Language course, you’ll want to start thinking about how you will plan out the first month of instruction. I always think that the first month is the most important of the school year—and maybe even the most important month of your students’ entire language learning experience!—as it sets the stage for all further exploration and acquisition of the target language.
The first month should be fun, it should be a bit light, but it should also be filled with cognitively and linguistically rigorous activities to set your students up for success in the language you’re teaching them. You teach a serious, academic subject, and your students need to treat it with the same level of seriousness that they would treat their math, English, social studies, or science classes!
In this blog post, I’m going to share some tips for how you can plan out the first few weeks of your French, Spanish, or Italian 1 classes. All of the instructional materials, activities, worksheets, and assessments referenced in this blog post can be found in my TpT shop. Simply click on the thumbnails below for the First Month of French, First Month of Spanish, and First Month of Italian to take a closer look!
I’m also including a SPECIAL COGNATES FREEBIE toward the end of this post! Continue reading to the end to grab your freebie!
Each First Month of… Bundle is designed to save you COUNTLESS hours of prep time. It is great for brand new World Language teachers who need comprehensive and engaging resources for their students, as well as veteran World Language teachers who are looking to diversify their instructional strategies, liven up their classroom with beautiful color-print posters, and enhance their assessment practices.
Each bundle contains over 400 pages worth of materials, including: Google Slides presentations, Class Notes, Practice Activities, Homework Assignments, Exit Tickets, Quizzes & Formative Assessments, Extension Activities, Reading Comprehension Activities, Interpersonal Speaking Practice Activities, Flashcards, Cultural Activities, Icebreaker Activities, Graphic Organizer, Surveys, and much more!!
The First Month of French, Spanish, Italian: Let’s start with PACING!
During the first few weeks of class, you’ll want to figure out how much time you will devote to key introductory concepts that every novice language learner should know: greetings and introductions, cognates, the alphabet, numbers (1-100), etc. This depends on a host of factors, including: How long are your periods/blocks? What level are your students (i.e. elementary, middle, high school?), and what are the particular learning strengths and weaknesses of your class? Have your students studied a language before?
For me, I teach 80-minute blocks that meet every other day, so here’s how I typically structure the first four weeks of instruction:
Week 1: Icebreakers, Cultural Activities, Basic Language Skills (e.g. Hello, How are you?, My name is…, Goodbye.)
Week 2: Useful Expressions for the Classroom, Cognates
Week 3: Greetings & Introductions
Week 4: Alphabet & Numbers
Click on the image above to access my First Month of French, Spanish and Italian - Sample Unit Plan Overview. Feel free to go to File --> Make a Copy and use this to help you plan! All of the activities & resources listed are available in my First Month of... Bundles!
Icebreakers & Cultural Activities
I think it’s important to start the school year off with light, fun icebreakers so that you get to know your students and your students get to know you (and each other!). In terms of Icebreakers, I want to make sure that I am meeting the following four goals:
Goal #1: Get my students talking & interacting!
Goal #2: Help my students understand the benefits of language learning!
Goal #3: Get to know my students!
Goal #4: Get my students up and moving!
In my French Class Icebreakers, Spanish Class Icebreakers, and Italian Class Icebreakers resources, I include various activities to help you accomplish all four of these goals!
I also like to have students complete a French, Spanish, Italian Fact Scavenger Hunt, where they learn linguistic and cultural facts related to the target language and culture. For this activity, each student holds a unique fact card and must communicate with his/her peers in order to: 1) find out more facts and update their activity sheet with the missing information and 2) transmit key information to their peers to help them complete their activity sheets.
Students work collaboratively to share facts and fill in the missing information on their activity handouts. This activity lists 20-25 minutes and gets students learning, interacting, moving, and enjoying your class!
Cognates & Useful Expressions for the Classroom
Spending time on cognates is a great way to help your students see just how similar the target language is to English. It’s a great way to build confidence in your students; YES, learning a new language is challenging, and YES, you are ALREADY capable of understanding a lot of words in the target language thanks to your knowledge of English!
We want to expose our students to comprehensible French, Spanish, or Italian, and we want them to engage in proficiency-oriented tasks as soon as possible in the school year. I like to assign practice worksheets as in-class assignments as well as for homework so that students begin drawing comparisons between the target language and English.
I also have them work collaboratively in an exciting Cognate Word Hunt to see how many cognates they can find in the designated time span.
Additionally, I think it’s important to teach students useful classroom vocabulary in the target language. For example, expressions like: “I have a question! May I go to the bathroom? May I get a drink of water? How do you spell…? I don’t know. I don’t understand. Repeat, please! Speak more slowly.”
For this lesson, I project a Google Slides presentation and have students look at each expression (which comes with a helpful pronunciation guide), copy it down in their class notes, and then repeat the expression out loud several times.
Students are so impressed that in the first week or two of class, they are already learning valuable expressions that they can use in class! Practice activities and assessments are also used to help students move toward mastery.
Greetings & Introductions
This series of lessons consists of direct instruction—which is SO needed during the first few weeks of class—coupled with ample practice activities that can be completed independently, in pairs, or in small groups. Start with a Google Slides presentation and class notes that students fill out to help them learn and retain the information.
A few worksheets are assigned as classwork to help students practice what they have just learned. I like to give a few practice exercises for students to complete for homework. In my view, students really do benefit from a bit of extra practice at home to further reinforce the work we’ve done in the classroom. And again, we want to communicate to students and parents that World Language is a rigorous, academic subject.
Proficiency-based tasks (reading, speaking, writing, and listening) help students build a strong foundation during the first few weeks of class! It’s so important to normalize proficiency tasks in your class. When you start your novice language learners off with proficiency activities from the very beginning, they see it as a natural part of the language learning process.
And finally, assessments are also included to help you gauge student mastery and collect data to inform subsequent interventions (e.g. reteaching? small group instruction? one-on-one peer tutoring?) with struggling students.
Interested in learning more? Check out my resources below!
Alphabet & Numbers (1-100)
Teaching the alphabet and numbers can be pretty boring, because it requires a lot of memorization on students’ parts….and unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to facilitate the memorization process by attaching context to the target vocabulary we’re trying to teach.
With that being said, I love teaching the alphabet and numbers because there are so many different fun activities you can do! In my French, Spanish, and Italian Alphabet and Numbers resources, I include the following activities and games:
Paired Interpersonal Speaking Practice (Practicing how to spell words)
Whole Class Interpersonal Speaking Activity (Students get new names in the target language and practice spelling them [and listening!] in the target language).
Numbers BINGO Activity
Numbers Board Game
Interactive Google Slides Activity
…and much more!
GRAB YOUR FREEBIE!
I hope that this post has given you some ideas for how you can plan the First Month of your French, Spanish, or Italian Class. Whether you are a brand new World Language Teacher or whether you’ve been doing this for many years, I think it’s always helpful to see what other teachers—who are actually still in the classroom—are doing in their classes to help their students learn the target language.
I’d love for you to grab this Cognates Reading Freebie by clicking on the image below!
All of the materials, resources, activities, worksheets, proficiency tasks, and assessments discussed in this post are available in the respective bundles. These units come fully prepped in order to save you time and energy!
Back to School season can be so stressful and exhausting, so investing in these resources is a great way to help conserve your energy and ensure that your students are having a great start to the school year!
You can access my units on TpT by clicking on the thumbnails at the top of this blog post, or clicking on the links below:
Do you have any tips, tricks, or secret techniques that you use to help your students learn this beginner introductory content? What are your favorite go-to activities for the first month of school? I’d love if you could share your experience in the comment section below!
Happy teaching,
~ Michael
