Last year our district switched to a rotating day block schedule for grades 7-12. This means I went from seeing students everyday for 50 minutes to seeing students every other day for 83 minutes. Quite a change. Especially after teaching on a traditional 7 period day for over 20 years. Needless to say, last year was a challenge for me as I adjusted to the new schedule, and if I am being honest, I would have to say that I never really did adjust last year at all.
However, after some reflection, as well as a lot of trial and (a lot of) error last year, I think I have hit upon a “formula” that seems to be working this school year. This is what it looks like: Spanish I: Opening song & class calendar. Each class has its own calendar, and we talk about the weather, what is going on in students' lives, etc. Tina Hargaden has an example of what this looks like in her classroom here. Write and Discuss. After discussing class calendar, we do a Write and Discuss about everything we just talked about. Sometimes students write along with me, sometimes students do a volleyball translation when the W&D is complete. Sometimes we just do a quick grammar talk about what came up in our writing. Mike Peto has blogged about the benefits of Write and Discuss here. Bell Ringer. This is a bit of a misnomer since this happens anywhere from 20-30 minutes into class, but by this point, my students need something to do other than listen to me, so I have them put pencil to paper in some way shape or form. I also need a bit of a break, and bell ringers provide a bit of down time for both students and myself. I do know that bell ringers are a bit controversial in the CI world, and I did break up with my bell ringer for a few years, but alas, on the block schedule, we need a bit of a break by this time in our class period. If you need inspiration for bell ringers, check out Cynthia Hitz’s blog post here. Review the bell ringer. Depending upon what students have done for a bell ringer, we will review it in a number of ways. For example, if the bell ringer asked students to respond to personal questions, we will have a class PQA session. If students had to match a sentence to an image, we may go over it 4 corners style, or class response. At any rate, we review the bell ringer together in some way, shape or form. CI “curriculum” I use SOMOS as the main curriculum in my classroom, but I supplement with A LOT of Sr. Wooly as well as movie talks, story listening, and cultural lessons. By this point in the class, we have about 40 minutes for whatever is on the docket with regards to “curriculum.” If the curriculum plan isn’t going to last a full 40 minutes (either by design or accident)... Option 1: Special Person interviews. These are such a great community builder for our classrooms. And they are a great way to sneak in extra vocabulary reps. (side note: I no longer target “family” or “sports” vocabulary as these come up so naturally and frequently in this process!) Bryce Hedstrom expertly explains the process here. Option 2: Dictado. If classes are getting rowdy from storyasking, homecoming, full moon...This is a nice calming activity. It settles them down, and is a great closing activity for metacognition. Option 3: Pop Up. I found this game on Anne Marie Chase's blog. She can describes it here. BTW: my students LOVE this game. Movement! And throughout, there is movement and Brain Breaks. Annabelle Allen has TONS of ideas here. Spanish II’s plan is pretty similar, with the exception that we start each day with FVR, and then roll out the same “format” as with Spanish I. This seems to be the structure that is working so far. Hopefully, with more trial than error this year.
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Jessie Oelke
#deptofone providing compelling and comprehensible input Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
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