Day One of Spanish One

To wrap up my first week of posting, I am returning to the first day of school.  Over my years of teaching, I have learned more and more how important it is for students to be able to use the language but also to not be afraid of trying to figure the language out.  So what if they don't know every word?  There are many ways to understand someone including body language and looking for similarities to English.

Therefore, on the first day of Spanish, I speak only Spanish to all my Spanish One learners.  I use a lot of hand gestures and do not go into anything in-depth (we save the classroom expectations' discussion for another day).  Instead, we play Animal Bingo.  Each student gets a bingo sheet with animals written in English on it.  I turn on the SmartBoard and we use the random word picker to highlight an animal in Spanish.  The students mark the word on their sheet and we go until someone calls out "Loto!" to win a sticker.

I love this opening activity!  The kids get pulled into the language and walk away feeling like they've learned something on day one.  While they may not retain the animal names, they have begun building an understanding of how cognates work.  Also as I discovered after giving a listening pre-assessment, they have started picking up basic classroom commands in Spanish after only one day.

The bingo sheets.  You can see most of the URL for the site where I made them.  Way more efficient to use an on-line bingo card generator than trying to write up 30 different boards myself!

The SmartBoard program.  The current word is highlighted in green.  Previous words that word stay highlighted as well but change color.