French, Spanish, and Italian Weather, Days of the Week, Seasons, Months Unit Lesson Planning
It’s always fun to teach students how to talk about the weather, days of the week, seasons, and months in French, Spanish, or Italian! This unit can be super engaging for students, because the vocabulary is so relevant, concrete, and useful. Given that this unit is one of the first that we delve into in our World Language classrooms, it’s important to utilize resources that are effective, engaging, and that help students learn, practice, and ultimately master target vocabulary.
In this blog post, I’m going to share some tips for how you can plan your Weather, Days of the Week, Seasons & Months Unit for 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 to take a closer look!
I’m also including a SPECIAL WEATHER UNIT FREEBIE toward the end of this post! Continue reading to grab your freebie!
French, Spanish, and Italian Weather, Days of the Week, Seasons, Months Lesson Plan Ideas: Let’s start with PACING!
Realistically, you need to determine how much time you want to devote to this unit. This depends on a host of factors, including: How long are your periods/blocks? What level are your students, and what are the particular learning strengths and weaknesses of your class? Have students studied a language before?
I like to divide this unit into two chunks, each lasting roughly one week:
Week #1: Weather Vocabulary, Days of the Week: Students will be able to describe the weather outside for each day of the week by using weather expressions and the days of the week vocabulary.
Week #2: Seasons and Months Vocabulary: Students will be able to talk about each of the four seasons, including what the weather is like and which months are included in each season. Students will be able to talk about their favorite months and seasons.
Click on the image above to access my French, Spanish and Italian Weather, Days of the Week, Seasons, Months- 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 Weather, Days of the Week, Seasons, Months Bundle!
Instructional Materials: How will my students learn new vocabulary?
I like to start with an interactive Google Slides presentation that I project on the whiteboard. Students receive a copy of the Class Notes and take detailed notes as I present each new weather expression. I say the expression out loud several times (students need repetition!), give them some time to copy the expression down, and then we repeat it out loud a few times together as a class.
Once all of the expressions have been practiced together as a class, I have students work in pairs and take turns practicing the expressions out loud. As they are doing this, I circulate the room and provide some feedback and offer corrections. If there are some major common errors I am hearing, I address them with the whole class. (As students are only just beginning to learn the expressions, I fully anticipate and welcome errors!) I always have a few sets of Flashcards printed out for students to begin practicing.
For the Days of the Week, Seasons, and Months, I like to give my students a Vocabulary List that they fill out and then keep in their binder to refer back to and study from. I also find Graphic Organizers to be incredibly helpful for the seasons & months, as students are able to categorize each month in a different season, which helps them to mentally compartmentalize the vocabulary.
Practice Activities: How will my students practice the new vocabulary?
This is my favorite part of the “instructional cycle” - students using what I’ve taught them in engaging and authentic ways, to be able to accomplish a task, and communicate and/or collaborate with their peers. So much fun! What types of practice activities can you offer your students?
Well, I like to start off with a practice worksheet (or two! I just photocopy them front/back) that has students implement the vocabulary they’ve just learned. I’ll then review the worksheet with students using one of the following methods:
Whole-class review: I project the worksheet(s) on the board and have students come up to the board to fill in the right answers. Sometimes I’ll write the answers in myself, but why rob students of the opportunity to write on the whiteboard?!
Peer review: Students work together to correct each other’s work. When students are done, they can come up to the front of the room and grab an Answer Key that I’ve already printed out, so that they can be extra certain that all of their answers are correct.
Here’s a sample of the types of worksheets you’ll find in my French, Spanish and Italian Weather, Days of the Week, Seasons, and Months Unit BUNDLES:
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. The following class, we’ll start with a Do-Now related to the vocabulary, check the homework assignment, and then play a vocabulary-related game.
In the French, Spanish, and Italian Weather, Days, Seasons Bundles, I include a bunch of different collaborative activities that students can work on together: Dice Games, Memory Games, and more!
Planning for Proficiency: How can I help my students become more proficient users of the target language?
Although practice worksheets and activities are important for vocabulary recall—and we cannot discount the fun and engagement factors in some of these activities, either—they are not the best at building student proficiency. We want our students to be able to use the language contextually and meaningfully, and so filling in blanks on a worksheet or matching an expression with a picture may not really help students move the needle forward in their proficiency.
To ensure that we are supporting and building our students’ proficiency, it is super important to infuse Reading, Listening, Speaking, and Writing activities into your unit. In my Unit Bundle, you will find the following resources to help your students improve their oral and written proficiency:
Weather Report Interpretive Reading Activity
Paired Speaking Activity (Weather & Days of the Week)
Weather, Sports, and Hobbies Sentence Writing Activity
Seasons & Months: Logical or Illogical? Interpretive Reading Activity
Sentence Revisions Proofreading Activity
Writing, Reading, Speaking Whole-Class Activity, and MORE!
Projects & Assessments!
It’s so important to formatively assess your students throughout the unit, so that you can gather data on student learning as well as prepare targeted interventions to help remediate students’ knowledge gaps. I often like to use Exit Tickets post-instruction to see how much students have acquired and retained during instruction - I use the data to inform what the Do-Now of my next class might address. I also use Quizzes to gather data on learning outcomes and ensure that my students are ready to move on to the next piece of the unit.
Pro Tip: You can also use Exit Tickets as Entry Tickets at the start of class!
At the end of the unit, I always like to give students a chance to utilize the vocabulary and grammar structures they have been working on in order to showcase their learning in a fun, engaging way. The performance task / summative assessment that I like to give for this unit is called Meteorologist for a Day Project.
This creative project ensures that you will be able to assess your students' growth meaningfully, fairly, and easily, while your students have a blast playing the role of a target language-speaking meteorologist!
For this project, students will pick three cities and play the role of meteorologist, as they present the weather in each city to their classmates. The project is completely EDITABLE, so you can customize it to best suit your students' needs. In this resource, I've included two versions for you to choose from, and each version allows students to do an oral presentation in front of their classmates, or create and edit a video to be shown to the class. This project also comes perfectly ready-to-go in PDF format, so your prep remains minimal.
Note: This project also includes tools to help students stay organized as they begin working on their project as well as EDITABLE Project Rubrics that you can use to easily and fairly assess your students.
GRAB YOUR FREEBIE!
Click on the image below to grab your Free Weather Dice Game, available in French, Spanish, and Italian!
I hope that this post has given you some ideas for how you can plan your French, Spanish, or Italian Weather, Days of the Weeks, Seasons & Months Unit. 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.
All of the materials, resources, Google Slides presentations, 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! 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 how to talk about the weather, days of the week, seasons, and months? What are your favorite go-to activities for this unit? I’d love if you could share your experience in the comment section below!
Happy teaching,
~ Michael
