HOT OFF THE PRESS! “Breaking News” Activity for WL Language Class from my 2nd Week of School- Template Included!

The beginning of the school year, once dreaded, is now becoming my favorite time of the year! I love all the new faces, new activities, and exploring the world of language. For the past couple of years, I have done this Todos sobre mí activity as well as this La máquina del tiempo activity to properly start off the year for my upper level students. And they’re great and free- so make sure you download to have some options. They have served a variety of purposes, and both allow students to review the present tense. However, this year, I changed it up, un poquito.

I had students write about one BIG SUMMER HIGHLIGHT and two minor highlights they might have had (OR MINOR HEADLINES). Now, I know what you all are thinking. Coming off the summer, we want to start light, which is why I’d normally do this activity: La máquina del tiempo. As the students say “no cap” this is one of my favorites. However, I wanted to change it up and as a 18 year veteran in the game, I thought I had the skills to do so.

Modeling the Activity for Students

The first thing I did was share about my summer and key in on past tense verbs- mostly the preterite to model and give them an idea of what I was looking for.

In Spanish levels 2 and 3 in my school, the teachers put a large emphasis on the preterite, so this would not have been too much of a stretch. At any rate, I kept it simple, and told them about my trip to several countries during the summer. Now, in retrospect, and for next year, I will certainly have a slide deck with the words, but this was totally in the moment.

Checking Comprehension

Since I have word walls in the room, I checked comprehension, asking them where did I go, and what I did. Next, I had them share two things they did and one of those had to be “I went.” This was to make sure that highly frequent structure had some good reps, and it’s one that’s extremely useful for this task. After sharing, they didn’t just start writing. I shared this Quizlet list, which I copied and edited.

They wrote the first few sentences, we shared out, and then I provided them with some writing aids (foldable grammar charts we bought from Teacher’s Discovery- I can link them later). They wrote about their summers, and shared with the class.

Click here for the template

Looking for more activities to rock out new school year? Check out this previous blog post on Nailing the Beginning of the School Year!

Nail Your First Day of School With This Dynamic WL Activity: It’s Student-Approved!

Now, in case you’re wondering this was not for a “grade” but I did provide a task completion grade for them writing 6 sentences using the past tense. When I checked their work, I decided to make only 2 corrections on each paper (this saved a lot of time).

The next day, I projected some of the errors, they worked in groups to correct, reviewed their papers and viola!