It is crucial to have a vision for your classroom. Sometimes we can get lost in the pixelated view of a single day or week; but we need to think bigger as educators. Can you paint a picture of how a perfect day would look, in terms of routines and the lesson itself?
There is no such thing as perfect, of course, but imagine if all of your students participated and were enthusiastic. (Although enthusiasm is rarely an issue in Lower School – more like, how do we bring the decibel level down?!) Imagine if all of your students behaved decently and were kind human beings. Imagine if you didn’t have to say on a regular basis, “Please don’t lick that marker,” or “Six-seven is only permitted in Spanish class if you say seis-siete (and 42 for older students, i.e., 6×7).
I attended a language conference this past weekend, and it really helped me to refocus and define what I want and don’t want to see in my classroom. So today, I’m going to paint you a picture of an elementary school Spanish classroom. We only meet 2-3 times per week for 30 minutes each time, so the expectations and goals might be different from yours, particularly if you are at an immersion school where every subject is in the target language. That said, let’s dive in.
Students in all grade levels line up outside of my classroom each day. They are required to say the “Spanish password” to me upon entering. These are typically high-frequency rejoinders, which change each week. First through fourth graders started with, “password” (contraseña) the first week. The second week was, “Tell me the password” (dime la contraseña) so that from that point on, the doorholder could “demand” the password from his/her peers, with yours truly overseeing. So now the routine looks something like this (with weekly variations) – and just keeps evolving:
DOORHOLDER: “Tell me the password or you can’t come in!” (¡Dime la contraseña o no puedes entrar!)
STUDENT: Seriously? I don’t remember! Banana? (¿En serio? ¡No me acuerdo! ¿Plátano?)
It is a fun way to teach expressions and natural language, and we insert these expressions and rejoinders into conversations whenever we can. In my ideal class, this takes about two minutes, and everyone walks nicely to their assigned seat on the carpet and gets to listen to a song playing on the board until the whole class is seated. In reality, some days it does take two minutes, and other days it takes eight because children have brought emotional baggage from recess arguments, and we have to resolve them before we can get started.
So before the lesson even begins, everyone has already said something in Spanish, and we’ve listened to a song. Most classes sit on the carpet to start, where they have assigned colors (part of the carpet design). Either myself or a class leader takes attendance by pointing to and naming the colors on a poster, and students respond with, “Presente” (present/here). We sometimes use a color wheel to switch it up.
Younger grades will do a minute or two of TPR (Total Physical Response) here to get their wiggles out and practice starting, stopping, and following directions (corre, salta, nada, camina, marcha, da la vuelta/ run, jump, swim, walk, march, turn around). Older students jump on and name Spanish-speaking countries on the Floor Map. If everyone has a turn, this can take a bit longer.
On days we skip the Floor Map, there is more time for gesture-storytelling. Here, we add a sentence or two each class to an ongoing saga about one of my stuffed animals or another character we’ve invented. Each grade level has a different story. In my ideal class, I spend more time asking students personalized questions (PQA) rather than simply pushing the plot forward. I know how valuable this input is, and I want to improve here (shoutout to TPRS Fluency and LatinFluency for reminding me of this).
We go on wild adventures with the characters, all while students acquire meaningful, high-frequency chunks of language. I try to make the words “trend” (as though it were a social media phenomenon), and will do whatever it takes to make a vocabulary structure memorable. Sometimes, the vocabulary or expressions taught are silly and meant to increase engagement; but most times, the vocabulary is versatile and can be applied or manipulated in other ways.
For example, one week, we “taught” my stuffed animal duck how to fly in PK4. The PK4 aid held up the higher part of a long string, a student knelt down and held the lower part, and my stuffed animal Pato sang, “I believe I can fly!” (Sé que puedo volar) repeatedly as he “flew” down the zipline. Since everyone wanted a turn to hold the string, we got in a lot of reps. This is a silly phrase to learn, but later we extended the language to ask which animals can and cannot fly; moving forward, we could add in more content-based material here (or cause and effect–e.g., when does a baseball fly?).
My ideal class comes full circle; so while flying a stuffed animal down a zipline is humorous and students do acquire language, we can “level up” by integrating this moment into a bigger story. We can transform our classrooms with little tweaks. When I think of “multisensory lessons,” for instance, this is the picture that comes to mind:
We turn off the classroom lights and add a pine scent to the diffusor: suddenly, we are in a forest at night. We hear some singing (I press an audio recording). Who is singing in the forest at night? We don’t know yet, but it is a famous Celia Cruz song! What is she saying? I spot something white at the front of the room, err, forest. Everyone gets a small taste: it is sugar! Celiz Cruz is known for saying, “¡Azúcar!” (Sugar!) in her songs – it is kind of her trademark.
But who is singing? The singing stops. Now we are worried (Worry Doll tangent?). Perhaps something has happened, or the person/ animal is lost. Let’s get a map and find whoever is lost. But it is dark and it starts to rain (me misting students with a spray bottle). There is a storm. Oh no! KAH-BOOM!
In five or ten minutes, we have not only incorporated language and culture into our lesson, we have also engaged the five senses: sight (lights), smell (pine), hear (song), taste (sugar), touch/ feel (rain).
Next, we will pretend that the forest is in a Spanish-speaking country, create a character and backstory for why s/he is singing this song, and follow a trail of sugar cookies to see where the character goes. Students might color and cut out pictures of cookies to make an actual trail, or taste real alfajores, or we will just pretend. Maybe the trail is very long, and we need a birds’ eye view to see the length of it — perhaps this is where the flying stuffed animal comes in. Or maybe, just maybe, your students have a better idea of how to combine the two.
My ideal class ends with some sort of cliffhanger, where students are excited to come back to class to find out what happens, or to continue with a project or activity. Some days, we extend the story and keep the creativity flowing, while on other days, we pause for Center Work and cultivate positive character traits like responsibility (cleaning up) and self- control (stopping an activity even when we’re not finished).
Either way, the time has been maximized to allow for a great deal of comprehensible input as well as opportunities to communicate with others in the target language. We touch on different cultures, build respect, and explore other perspectives (e.g., Aymara).
As students are leaving, they tap a number on a vertical number line by the door. A “diez” (10) means they are feeling great, a “cinco” (5) is an average day, and an “uno” (1) is terrible. This gives me an idea of how the lesson went, and I can check in with students who are below a five to find out what’s going on. This is especially nice for the quieter students or ones with poker faces that you can never read.
To conclude, then, my ideal classroom includes listening and speaking (with reading and writing for older students), incorporates all of the senses, and has moments and activities that connect to a bigger picture: it might be a ridiculously hilarious story, a story with a moral, or a story with a hands-on activity and game. It might be a conversation where students are emotionally engaged, want to know more, and forget that their teacher is speaking in the target language. But no matter what, it is a lesson where all of the laughing and tangents and projects lead us home and back to the reason we are here: to learn and fall in love with Spanish (and all languages), and to have fun along the way.
ACTFL’s five pillars sum it up best: communication, cultures, communities, comparisons, and connections. But my favorite is connections: connections to ourselves, connections to the world, connections to each other. This is the meat and potatoes of acquiring another language because without connections, sans relating to others, what is the point?
This is my ideal classroom and dream. What is yours?
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