Spanish 4 Unit: Engaging for Hispanic Heritage Month!

Are you a Spanish 4 teacher looking for some ways to save your time and sanity? This Spanish 4 unit is just the thing! I just finished creating a 7-week unit called “Hispanos influyentes” and I’m so excited to share it with you!

I will not disclose how long it took me to research and create every part of this unit, but suffice it to say it took a long time. But imagine a 7-week time span when ALL of your lesson plans, activities and assessments are already created and done for you!!!

What would you do with the extra time that gave you? Spend extra time planning your other preps? Get your correcting done at school? Leave at your contracted time and go home to your personal life able to be present?

What Does a Spanish 4 Unit Need?

If it were me, and if I were going to spend my hard-earned money on a unit, I would need everything to be done for me. This Spanish 4 unit will not disappoint! Content, culture, grammar, vocab, assessments, a project, homework- it’s all included!

All 7 weeks have 5 days of step-by-step lesson plans. And you can see in the image below that each activity that students will participate in is linked right in. Have you ever had to search through a folder in your Google Drive to find that one document? Now you don’t have to! Everything you need is linked where you need it! Click HERE to see more!

What’s in this Spanish 4 Unit?

It is broken down into 3 kinds of influential people:

Athletes: Leo Messi, Roberto Clemente, Rebeca Andrade and Paola Espinosa

Creatives: Salma Hayek, Oscar de la Renta and Frida Kahlo

Activists: Simón Bolívar, Rigoberta Menchú and Che Guevarra

Students will participate in new learning through a number of different kinds of engaging activities both alone and in collaboration with others!

The grammar themes covered in this unit include:

review of preterite and imperfect
Review of comparisons
Learn the present perfect

Does This Spanish 4 Unit Help Prepare Students for AP Spanish?

Why, yes! It does! This unit is designed for pre-AP students, and it begins to introduce some of the tasks they will see on the AP test. It’s never too early to get started on familiarizing students with what the tasks are and how to complete them well and efficiently. It’s great to get started early!

This Influential People Spanish 4 unit has practice with comparisons (students do a cultural comparison on the AP test), writing formal essays (students write a formal argumentative essay on the AP test) and with replying to an email, which they do on the AP Test. They also have practice reading and listening and answering questions based on what they understood.

But Is This Spanish 4 Unit Engaging?

I think so! I am a veteran teacher who has seen it all…. the changing landscape of our students post-Covid must be taken into consideration, along with the newest theories on language acquisition.

I incorporate games and group activities along with student choice as often as possible to raise interest and engagement. I provide clear examples and rubrics to set students up for success. These lesson plans are for my students as well as yours. Their success and buy-in is important!

Is It Worth The Price?

Some teachers love planning and creating activities. I do! It’s one of my favorite parts of being a teacher! But the reality is that when we have a new course, or no curriculum, or no textbook, or no colleagues, or are teaching 3 and 4 and 5 preps, or mixed classes, there are only so many hours in the day.

I had a rough time doing the job I loved when my kids were growing up and when I was a new teacher. I did not enjoy good work-life balance. Now I have the opportunity to help provide that to other teachers!

Think of it this way…. Is getting back hours of your time and reducing your stress to only worrying about the copy machine worth $1.28 per day? For some of us, it is! And let’s not forget that these lesson plans are in Google Docs. They can be edited and saved, so next year, everything you used and/or added and changed is ready to go again!

This unit is designed to be Unit 1 in a year-long curriculum that I’m still developing, like the units I have already created for AP Spanish. They are designed to meet both teacher and student needs based on all of my years of experience and on all that my students have taught me. Unit 2 is called Leyendas hispanas, and continues to build on grammar, content, vocabulary and level appropriate AP Test Prep!

I hope that some teachers will find this to be a life-saver. Here are some happy customers who have purchased other units I’ve created!