Calendar talk is a CI (Comprehensible Input) activity that is part of many teachers’ routines in the classroom. It is essentially just that, talking about the calendar. What began as simply saying the date has grown into much more than that. I spoke with John Sifert on episode #170 of the podcast and he offered useful and actionable insights into how Calendar Talk is much more than calendars. In this post I want to share with you my own process of doing this type of activity that engages students on a wide variety of topics as we begin the class. You can download my Spanish Google Slides with all of the embedded links right here if you want to try it out yourself and save lots of time.
We start with the date. This is rather simple and straight forward and you can get as elaborate as you would like depending on the proficiency level of the class. For more novice level students I put the digits with the numbers, but leave out the numbers once these are no longer needed. You’ll also see the date structure across the top to support students early on. Again, as students are more proficient I begin to remove the supports.
Saying the date is just step 1. We then look at the details and questions to the right on the slide. We look at what may be happening on this day or during the week. Are there sports or drama practices? Is there a game? If so, where and who is the opponent? Was there a game yesterday? What was the score? Who won? Are there assessments in any of your other classes today or this week? Is it anyone’s birthday? Does anyone in your family have a birthday today?
There are lots of questions and comments to make the date more engaging for higher levels, such as looking at events that have happened on this date in history either in your community/country or in a country of the target language culture. You can also have students say what the date was yesterday and what it will be tomorrow. As you can see, there are lots of opportunities to introduce and embed vocabulary and structures into these discussions. They will also organically recycle themselves as you repeat this activity in your classroom.
We then move onto the weather. There is a slide that has images of weather with the phrases. For more advanced groups I don’t have the words, but just the images to support students.
We then continue with the time. Initially I use a slide with lots of support and scaffolding, but remove most of these details as we move on in proficiency and students can rely on their own language to produce language.
Once we have talked about what is happening in our community, including the date, weather and time, the fun really begins. It’s now time to look at and compare these details to what is happening in the world, with a particular focus on the target language countries. There are many ways that you may want to go about this, but this is the process that has worked well for me.
I have the flags for target language countries (Spanish in these examples) in a small basket. One student chooses a paper with the flag and identifies the country. They can seek help from a classmate if needed, but they begin to recognize them fairly quickly after a while. You may want to begin with the name of the country with the flag.
We then talk about some country details, such as the colors of the flag, the capital, the nationality, location, weather and time. To help with the visuals I have location, weather and time websites linked on a slide for quick and easy access. When you click on the link with the country name it takes you to the specific country information.
When talking about the location we focus on borders and surrounding countries, the capital and other cities, towns and land features. Are there lakes and what are the oceans or seas? What countries border to the north, south, east or west?
When we talk about the weather we can see some visuals and also look at how the temperature is displayed. For countries that use a different system (Celsius or Fahrenheit) this is a great opportunity to practice numbers. For lower level students I have a conversion chart on the wall, but for your more advanced students, who may be learning about this in their science class, they could perhaps do the conversion on their own.
When we talk about time I begin by asking students if they think there is a time difference between where we are and the country we are looking at. If there is a time difference, how many hours? Is it earlier or later? This also provides an excellent opportunity to look at concepts such as daylight savings because the same country may be a different time depending on the months.
I particularly like this process with students because it gives them regular opportunities to use a lot of these common and necessary language elements in a very contextualized way. It also organically exposes them to the ideas like differences in weather, time and geography. As students engage in reading and various authentic documents from target language cultures they often refer back to these details that they learned in these Calendar Talk activities.
