Calendar Time in the Elementary Spanish Classroom Part One

Calendar time is a natural thing to do in the elementary World Language classroom. Students are used to doing it in their regular classroom and it's an opportunity to introduce and practice content - math, science, and even geography. I got the chance to observe some of the regular classroom teachers and even some Dual Language Immersion teachers to see how they do calendar and I've copied what I liked, adjusted what I needed to, and now my kiddos love calendar time. Here are some ideas to get you started.

Set up your calendar area.

Have a calendar area that all students can see. Consider what you want to go over. I have the calendar with months on the side so students can access them when they need to. There is also a weather chart, a seasons poster, numbers to practice the temperature and a weather bear that we dress based on the weather.

I also have other language students need - Sentence starters above from Miss Maestra on TpT, a ¿Cómo estás? poster, hands with right and left, and even some adjectives we often use in class. I also have a growing group of stuffed animals that we greet with Hola and Adios every day in kindergarten (It's amazing how much better they know their animals this year doing this!)

I got my calendar set from the local Teacher Parent Store but here is a link to it on Amazon. Here is another cute one as well.

The weather bear is magnetic and I wasn't sure how I would move it from the white board to the bulletin board but my student teacher had the great idea of using command strips on a cookie sheet. Her clothes are kept in a bucket on the bookshelf and we can easily dress her based on the weather.

My seasons poster came from my Scholastic Let's Find Out subscription. I highly recommend Let's Find Out for any Spanish FLES classroom. I've gotten so many good resources from it! If you need seasons cards/posters you can get them in my TpT store.  Also included are weather cards, clothing cards, student calendar pages, and a weather bear to dress.

Other ideas -

1. Clocks to practice time. You could have multiple clocks to show what time it is in other countries. 2. Multiple weather charts to show the weather around the world. (We usually talk about other places but only post Lexington on our chart.)
3. Shapes or colors on the days of the calendar that make a pattern. The teacher turns over the day  but before she dose students must predict the next part of the pattern.
4. Number of days in school. Deconstruct the numbers by 100, 10s and 1s.
5. Number of the day. For younger students you could use a 10 frame. Or you can have one more, one less, 10 more, 10 less.

A calendar bulletin board in an immersion kindergarten classroom

So that's my calendar area. What does yours look like? What elements do you have? In my next post I'll talk about how I introduce the vocabulary and what our actual routine looks and sounds like.