How to Lesson Plan for Spanish Class

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When it comes to planning, sometimes it feels like you’re staring at a blank slate and have NO IDEA where to start. I wanted to share the framework or set up I generally follow when designing a daily lesson so you could see if it might work for you! Let’s look at these tips for how to lesson plan for Spanish class!

Something that helps me when planning is to have kind of a fill in the blank style of plan. I set up class in a very familiar routine on a day-to day basis. I’ve found that this helps me be more efficient in my planning, but also helps students have a familiar structure when we’re working. Today I’m going to outline that structure for you and share a bit about how I fill in the blanks of that template as well!

It’s important to note that this is something I would do with my 8th-12th grade students, in Spanish 1 & 2 classes, in a 45-50 minute class period. I’ve never taught block schedule, except for the odd testing week, so I’m not going to speak to that too much in this post. If that sounds like something you’re ready for, let’s get right into it!

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How to Lesson Plan for Spanish Class

Start of Class Routine

First, I always start class with the same routine. A quick how are you, calendar talk, and weather talk to begin every class period. I have a full post with examples and visuals here if you want to see more. Basically I just want to know how my students are each day, and then we knock out some basic skills little by little, while building relationships at the same time. Win win! That routine takes about 5-8 minutes of class, with a little wiggle room if there’s something someone really wants or needs to talk about that day.

Daily Routine

Next, we do our daily routine. This might be weekend chat, could be reading, or maybe special person interviews. Again, I have a post where I go into detail about each of the daily routines I prefer to use here. These usually last about 10 minutes each day.

You’ll notice, JUST with daily routines we’ve already knocked out about ⅓ of our class period. That’s a lot of planning that you don’t have to stress about every day just by having a routine in place. This really helped me reduce my prep time!

Activities and Lessons

Then we get into activities tied to our unit. And this gets a little wiggly, and less routine than the first two segments as it depends on where we are in our unit, but generally we do 2-3 different activities to reinforce the language.

I have an entire playlist titled “comprehensible input activities” and basically I use that as a word bank to pull from as I’m planning to pick and choose activities to reinforce the skills and the language we’re working on in class at that time. You might also like this blog post for more ideas!

This part is a liiiitle more vague, but it gets more into unit planning than lesson planning, in my opinion. If you want to talk about unit planning sometime, leave me a comment and let me know if that’s a post you’d like to hear more about in the future!

Exit Tickets and Formative Assessments

Finally, we wrap up class with an exit slip or a quick formative assessment. I have a post where I talk about different exit tickets I like to do, but a really common one for me is to just ask 5 T/F questions about something we read or listened to that day. Exit tickets aren’t ever something super in-depth for me, I just want to get a feel for where they are!

Final Dismissal

Last but not least, as the bell is ringing we do our final dismissal. This is something I got from Bryce Hedstrom and at first I thought it was kind of corny, but I actually really love it, and the kids use it, too! I just say, “Clase, gracias por aprender” and they answer “Profe, gracias por enseñarnos”. Sweet, right?

Some days when we’re a little more hectic than usual and I’m just hollering “GRACIAS POR APRENDER!” as they run out the door, they holler right back at me, or sometimes when it’s slipped my mind all together on those REALLY crazy days (you know the ones!) a student will surprise me as they’ve finished packing up and are heading out the door by just thanking me on their way out. It’s good for the heart, trust me! You should give it a shot.

How to Lesson Plan for Spanish Class

I hope that was helpful for you! I wanted to share just one more resource that I think could support you as you’re lesson planning. I have made a spreadsheet of about 100 activities that you can use as a reference while you’re planning – especially when you get to that 2-3, pick and choose activity part of the day.

Click here to check it out!