Calendar talk has been a consistent routine in my classroom since my first day of teaching, long before I knew about Comprehensible Input and TPRS.
What is Calendar Talk?
Calendar talk is a daily routine to provide comprehensible input and repetition for students of numbers 1-30, days of the week, months of the year and weather in Spanish. Most teachers ask their students the following questions:
- What is today? (¿Cuál es la fecha de hoy?)
- What day will tomorrow be? (¿Qué día será mañana?)
- What day was yesterday? (¿Qué día fue ayer?)
When I first began teaching, my students knew we started class every day with the same routine. The questions I used each day included:
- What’s the date?
- What’s the weather?
- How are you?
Within the first couple weeks of Spanish 1, students learned some basic weather expressions, days and months so we could begin these routines. I helped them with the numbers until they felt confident to do it on their own. The entire first semester, I asked different students the questions each day, but by second semester, I passed the torch to my calendar talk question master. Each day a new student served as question master, reading off the questions and calling on students to answer. This gave them the opportunity to practice asking questions instead of just answering, and it allowed them some leadership.
All of this great practice only took us a few minutes and provided daily repetition of the vocabulary, plus structure and order to our class!
Speaking activities for Calendar Talk
Calendar talk naturally lends itself to speaking. Start each month by adding birthdays and special events to your calendar. Students love counting down to long weekends and breaks! They also love seeing their birthday listed on the board each day during their birthday month. Singing to students on their birthday is a great community builder as well.
Additional speaking topics emerge seasonally. Don’t ignore them! You can talk about holidays, special events in the school, sports tournaments and a whole lot more! Here are some very basic ideas.
How to use calendar talk with more advanced Spanish students
If your students already know how to answer the simple calendar questions listed above, try some of these activities!
Call on students to come to the board and fill in the date and weather for your hometown. Students love to write on the board! Then call on 4 different students to answer the questions by reading what their classmates wrote.
Add some culture to your weather talk by looking at weather in other countries! This slide links to weather.com/es for each countries capital. It’s a great way to teach the names of the Spanish-speaking countries, their capitals, flags, and so much more!
Each day a different student reads the question and chooses the country they want to explore that day. They also call on a classmate to answer their question.
Student 1: Sara, ¿Qué tiempo hace hoy en Cuba?
Sara: En Cuba está setenta y dos grados y está soleado. Isabel, ¿Qué tiempo hace hoy en Paraguay?
Isabel: Hace 68 grados y está nublado.
You can also follow up with additional questions:
- What’s the capital?
- What will be the high and low temperatures today?
- At what time is it going to rain?
- In your opinion, which country has better weather today?
- Which country is colder today?
Reasons to love Calendar Talk
- Students get to practice numbers above 31 in Spanish because they report the temperature in each place.
- Students get to view a real website and see the language in context.
- We can make comparisons by looking at our own weather as well the weather in a Spanish speaking country.
- Students unofficially learn, practice and repeat the capitals of the Spanish speaking countries and see their flags
- We can talk about high and low temperatures (more number practice!)
- Extra repetitions of days of the week!
- More advanced structures and room for differentiation by using past, future, and conditional tenses!
- When did it rain? What will the temperature be on Friday? When would be a good day to go to the beach?
Integrate writing and speaking into calendar talk
Try having more advances students write about their weekend each Monday for about 8-10 weeks. This will give them enough time to acquire the past tense structures. Make sure you provide them with the vocabulary they need to be successful! Students can turn and talk to a neighbor or share their writing with the whole class. Pro tip: set a timer for 5 minutes and encourage students to keep writing for the entire time.
Once you feel like students really have a solid grasp of the past tense, change the routine to keep things interesting! Move your writing day to the end of class on Fridays and ask students to write in the simple future tense!
What other ways to you add spice and pizzazz to your calendar talk? Comment below!
