How deeply have you thought about Spanish class warm-ups? They may be called Do Nows, Bell-Ringers, or some version of that in Spanish…. and many teachers incorporate them as part of their class routine.
A few years back, our school began requiring that every teacher start their class with a Do Now. As you can imagine, it was met with resistance from some teachers who like the autonomy of running their class their own way.
But last year, my “professional learning community” used our Do Nows as a way to specifically target problems of practice. It became a powerful tool in our classrooms!
Before I forget, you can get a free list of Spanish Class Warm-ups here!
What Spanish Class Warm-Ups Can I Do Every Day?
One of the areas of resistance with some teachers is that it can feel like another thing to plan every day, in every class. And that’s a real challenge.
One way I get around this is by having the same kind of warm-up every day. My favorite way to start class is by displaying a topic that I ask my students to turn and talk about in Spanish. One of our biggest problems of practice has been that on our Seal of Biliteracy tests, our students were scoring lowest on the speaking portion.
So, I designed slides that went with the theme of our unit, slides that went with a tense we were working on, and slides that went with a season on the year. I interchange these, but the class routine is to be ready to turn and talk about whatever the slide says. I try hard to make the topics interesting to teens. And I’m happy to report that this has made a huge positive impact on their speaking scores! This is one way in which you can use your Spanish class warm-ups to target a specific area of need!
Other Ways To Use Spanish Class Warm-ups To Target Skills
We offer students the chance to take the Seal of Biliteracy test twice a year… in the Fall and in the Spring. This year, after the Spring administration, my teacher group was discussing the other types of challenges we saw with our students. A lot of them were grammar focused. We know that continued exposure to the language can eventually lead to self-correction. But we wanted to fast track some of the error corrections, or at least call their attention to them!
One teacher mentioned that their Spanish 3 students didn’t know the possessive pronouns. A Spanish 2 teacher found that some students were struggling to improve accuracy in the present tense. A 3rd teacher found that students were using the same 2 transition words and wanted to help her students improve their vocabulary in this area. So, we did a teacher experiment!
We designed a 5-day set of Warm-ups. Day 1: review of something from this unit. Day 2: Review of a grammar point students in our individual class struggle with. Day 3: Turn and talk Day 4: Culture Day 5: Teacher choice
This kept us all rowing in the same direction while also giving us the opportunity to personalize things for our students. We created our slides with the daily theme. We duplicated them so we would have the outline ready for several weeks. And every Friday during our meeting time, we talked about what went well the previous week, what changes we were seeing in students, and then we created the Warm-ups for the coming week. We collaborated and shared, and the results were really encouraging!
Doing this cycle of inquiry with my colleagues reminded me that intentionality has such a HUGE impact on student growth. I hope knowing how targeting our Warm-ups in my school really helped improve student outcomes will inspire you to a) do daily warm-ups in Spanish class and b) plan them with intention to what you want your students to achieve!
Resources You May Like
Spanish Task Cards The Four Seasons Bundle
Spanish Chat Cards Bundle for Present, Past and Future Speaking & Writing
Spanish Seal of Biliteracy Test Prep Bundle
Other Posts You May Find Helpful
Bell-Ringer Activities for Spanish Class (free list of Bell-Ringer Activities!)
