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Formal Lesson Plans for Spanish Classes

January 16, 2016

After I graduated high school, the my alma mater back in CNY hired a really awesome Spanish teacher to replace one of mine that retired. My younger siblings LOVED her class, and I have saved several projects that my sister completed as a student in her class to use for inspiration for my own lessons! Well, that teacher--Mrs. Melissa O'Brien--is now using CI, and we have been emailing back and forth during this school year! She has since switched over to the middle school, and I am so happy that students in my hometown are receiving such an awesome start to their language student careers!

Like many of you, Señora O'Brien has a lot of standards to address. Common Core standards, Danielson domains, and edTPA requirements, to name a few! One of her formal observations fell during the week that she was working through Unit 2 of my SOMOS curriculum for Spanish 1, which works with the structures camina (walks), corre (runs), and ve (sees) and uses them to introduce students to the running of the bulls. (See the script here--in Spanish and English--that I got from Carol Gaab's "The First Two Weeks" packet, and download the unit in Spanish here or in French here). She had to write up formal plans for the lesson, and she has given me permission to share them on this blog! Yes!! I hope that they will be helpful to many of you out there that are anticipating spring observations. The lesson that her administrator observed was on the day following story asking, when students had already created the class story. She started by reading through the story with the class, employing all of her key TPRS®/CI strategies, and then she followed it with a Blind Retell. She ended the lesson by having students write alternate endings to the class story. I think that this was a GREAT plan for an observation, because while it is very much an input-focused lesson, students are talking and interacting, which admins always expect to see when they observe a language class.

(Side note: it would be helpful to share and review this observation checklist, created by Bryce Hedstrom, with your administrator in your pre-observation conference...if you have that opportunity! It will give you an opportunity to explain what a TCI classroom looks like and why it is an effective manner of instruction...and why they might see less time spent with students talking amongst themselves than they expect!)

With her permission, I've added Melissa's lesson plans to my Lesson Plan templates folder located in the Comprehensible Classroom Subscriber Library (in the Administrative Items folder). Click on each of the images below to access the two forms that she put together for the lesson, and click here to see some other examples of formal lesson plans.

Can I get a collective "THANK YOU SEÑORA O'BRIEN U R D BEST!"?!

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