El Tiempo Unit (Week 2)

We ended our unit on weather today so I thought I would share some of the activities that we did during the week.  

Our goal for the end of this week was to be able to write a brief weather report, in Spanish, expressing the current temperature and weather conditions as well as future temperature and weather conditions.

This will feed directly into my next unit on making plans and accepting/rejecting invitations.  Since the weather often dictates what types of leisure activities we may do and when/where we might do them, we will be recycling a lot of these ideas during the next lesson.  But for now, we are starting with a written weather report.

Day 1:  Our main activity was an interpersonal speaking/information gap style activity taken from my Integrated Performance Assessment on the Weather.  Since I knew I was not going to be assessing that mode this time around, but I still wanted to practice it, I just used it as a class activity.  Here is a portion of the activity so that you can see the general idea:

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Day 2:  I wanted students to practice answering questions about weather in both written and spoken form.  I grouped my kids by threes and gave each group a set of 15 weather speaking prompts.  Each student took on the role of either the interviewer (asks the questions), interviewee (answers the questions), or the reporter (writes down the interviewee's responses to each question).  They switch roles every 5 questions so that they get to practice listening, speaking, and writing.  This is actually a concept that can be applied to most worksheets if you are looking for ways to differentiate.  Here are some of the questions we worked with of varying difficulty:

Day 3:  We spent some time on Google Classroom looking up the weather for various cities and writing weather reports based on the information given on the English site www.weather.com.  

Day 4:  We listened to the song "Hasta Que Salga el Sol" by Don Omar and practiced changing the lyrics based on the vocabulary and verb structures we had worked with during the week.

Here is a portion of one of the activities that we did so that you can see how we applied our new found vocabulary to existing grammatical structures:

Day 5:  ​Today was assessment day!  After two weeks of working with weather (one week of listening/reading activities and one of speaking/writing activities) it was time to see if they met their goal of being able to write a brief weather forecast.  The assessment was a simple enough concept but really gave them a wide range of things they could have said.  I will grade it using the ACTFL presentational rubric for novice level.  Download your own copy of the assessment here:

weather_writing_assessment.pdf
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So how did they do?  It's becoming clearer and clearer with every assessment that most of them are at or soon will be at the Novice-High level, which is our goal for the end of the year.  Here are some examples of their writing:

You will notice that there are some mistakes that are being made pretty consistently which shows me what I need to continue to focus on with them.  Overall though, I am very pleased with the increase in complexity and detail that they show over a level 1 student dealing with the same topic.  The growth is evident by the more sophisticated use of vocabulary and the ability to talk about future weather conditions (rather than only current conditions).  They are getting more and more consistent with using complete sentences, which is encouraging knowing how hard we have worked at this.  At the beginning of the year, many of them didn't really understand what the term "complete sentence" and "verb" meant.

Many of the lessons used during this week are up in my store.  Look for the links to find the specific products or just look at the information here - I hope it inspires a new lesson for you!