Sample Lesson Materials

6th Grade Spanish: Identifying Story Information

Lesson Basics

Grade Level: 6th or 7th Grade

Content Area: Spanish (1st year of Instruction)

Lesson Title: Story-Lesson: "Es Una Ganga"

Learning Objective: All of my lessons drive toward both an input standard (reading and/or listening) and an output standard (speaking and/or writing) -

- Input (assessed in this lesson): I can identify explicit and implicit information in an unfamiliar story text written at the Novice-High level.
- Output (assessed 1x monthly): I can retell familiar stories at the Novice-Mid level.

Additional Information: This lesson is centered around the story told in a music video from the Señor Wooly platform. My school pays for a subscription to this site and I frequently use these videos for my MCP units, as they are high-interest for students and help motivate them to persevere with self-directed learning. I sought and received permission from the Señor Wooly team to post a unit based on his video.

Prior to engaging with the instructional video and practice, we watch the video together as a class - the videos are super-entertaining and generate a ton of buy-in to doing the work.

Instructional Video

I film my Instructional Videos in Screencastify, using a simple Google Slides deck as the content. My story-based lessons feature text that is carefully written to be highly comprehensible for my student’s current level.

The Instructional Videos feature:

a) images to support the language being used;

b) video of me making facial expressions and gestures to support student comprehension of this language.

I also add embedded questions to increase engagement. Watch my Edpuzzle video to see those!

Engagement Strategy

My guided notes consist of the full story text. As students watch the instructional video, they pause, chunk by chunk, to fill in missing words and annotate key vocabulary. As they move into the practice, students can use this story text to support their work, with the goal of needing this scaffold less and less with each subsequent activity.

For most lessons, students can engage with the instructional video directly via a YouTube link or embedded in an Edpuzzle.

Learners who can better self-monitor their comprehension often choose the direct route and then self-check their guided notes with a paper answer key after they finish.

Learners who need the structure of frequent checks for understanding are encouraged to use the Edpuzzle; this tool lets them verify their comprehension one step at a time as they proceed.

In addition, students working on the instructional video in pairs often choose the direct route, while students working independently frequently use the Edpuzzle.

Practice Work

The practice for this lesson consists of a choice board featuring nine tiered activities. In a story-based approach to Language Acquisition, the goal is for students to repeatedly re-engage with the baseline text to the point that the language feels natural and automatic.

But I can’t just expect a middle school student to compliantly re-read a text because I said so (and they wouldn’t get much out of that anyway)! Instead, I hook them into re-engaging with the text by packaging it in a variety of activities.

The top row in the choice board is “Suave” (mild) with 3 options.
The middle row is “Mediano” (medium) with 3 options
The bottom row is “Picante” (spicy) with 2 options
- - The bottom row also features the “Extra” option of practicing on the Señor Wooly site - the source of this story.

Not including the “Extra,” the practice for this unit features:

4 reading activities
2 listening activities
1 writing activity
1 speaking activity.

I usually ask students to do four activities as the “Must Do” and six activities as the “Should Do.” My “Aspire To Do” activities are not tied to a specific unit; they are synthesis activities that span multiple lessons.

When completing the “Must Do” and “Should Do” requirements, I sometimes guide students toward certain choices based on data about what they most need, but I also try to give them the freedom to choose as much as possible. When they choose, they tend to do more practice!

Mastery Check

Our ultimate reading and listening goal in Spanish is the ability to comprehend unfamiliar texts. Therefore, the Mastery Check asks students to work with what I call a “parallel universe text” - a story similar to, but different from, the unit story.

Students first complete two activities on a learning platform called Textivate to manipulate the unfamiliar text; success with the activities requires attention to both content and language conventions. Their score on this part of the Mastery Check is what is recorded in my grade book as a formative grade.

Then, students also respond to four open-ended questions about the parallel universe story, self-checking and self-rating their answers against a master answer key. This score does not get recorded but is a critical practice for summative reading assessments, which consist solely of open-ended questions about the content of the text.

I landed upon this process because the Textivate activities are self-scoring and save me time while still being a valid gauge of growth. I need to save my grading energy for the summatives!

I always create two versions of the Mastery Check so that students who struggle with their first submission can re-attempt with a different story. I generally require anyone scoring below an 80% to re-attempt after either:

a) completing 1-2 additional Practice activities or

b) meeting with me to work through their first Mastery Check attempt together

Progress Tracker

I have experimented with many different Progress Trackers over the past few years! I eventually landed on a fairly simple Google Sheet that students are allowed to edit. Training them to edit only their own row and in the appropriate manner takes some time and effort, but it is worth it to save me time during and after class and to give them more ownership over the process.

Key elements of my Progress Tracker include:

Column B: This helps me keep track of who I meet with individually or in small groups over the course of this lesson/unit. I try to use data to target this kind of intervention, and I also try to ensure I meet with all students in this way at least every other lesson/unit (so about once every 2-3 weeks).
Key (Image): This helps students remember what they are responsible for editing and the expectations for how much practice to do.

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