C, day 3 of the #AtoZChallenge

C is for Calendar Time!

Tweet this!One of the ways to make the language comprehensible and compelling is to have "Calendar Time" at the beginning of every class. Many of my CI* colleagues call Calendar Time, Small Talk. Calendar time is very similar to CircleTime in an elementary classroom.

When students walk in, they work on their "do now" of writing the date, the weather, and their opinion of the weather with the following scaffold posted:


After everyone is done, I pull up the class' calendar sheet in smartnotebook. We review today's date and what the next date(s) are if our class won't be meeting on those days. Then the students share what's going on in their life and we put it on the calendar as you can see here:
 The next day the class meets, we go over the dates again, and we confirm if events happened.For example, above, "Ava va a fare lo snowboard." She reported that she didn't go because of her brother. So we change the verbs to the past(a great way to see the present perfect and imperfect in context) and add the reason: "Ava non ha fatto lo snowboard a causa di suo fratello."
 I dont' stop here :). Of course, if it's someone's birthday(actual or 1/2), we write that on the calendar as well as their age. We also talk about the day's TL holiday if there is one, or what social media day it is. For example, Tortellini day was a great day to talk about what they are, where they're from and ClipChat a youtube recipe video about them.
 Even when there isn't an over tie in to the TL, you can create one. On pet day, we talked about who did and didn't have a pet,

I asked students to guess what the most populat pet is in Italy, and then revealed the answer:
 Then we examined some comprehensible infographics, talked about what they meant, and see if our classes percentages were simillar or different to those of Italy. In my upper level class, students then created their own infographics to make a comparison.


There are many sources where you can find the day's social media 'day'. My favorite is National Day Calendar(they list several each day, some of my students now look it up before class and guess which one will I discuss!) I also refer to National Day Calendar which sometimes offers different options.

For Italian here are my go to sites
Calendario delle Giornate Mondiali
Giornate, anni e decenni internazionali
Il calendario delle giornate mondiali

And this is the one I consult for French
Journée mondiale



How do you do small talk in your class?

*CI- comprehensible input

A presto,

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