In my previous post, I showed you a general overview of my year. Now, let’s take a closer look at each level. This is my K-2 curriculum, ¡No me digas! I created it myself and it has three cycles over three years: kindergarten, first, and second at my school. For example, I have El Ciclo del Cuerpo, My Body Cycle. This is the cycle that I’m teaching this year. I just released ¡Qué lindo! on Teachers Pay Teachers. If you taught ¡No me digas! last year with Me gusta and ¿Quienes pizza?, then you can definitely start with ¡Qué lindo!

There’s two ways you can use ¡No me digas! You can either do a linear curriculum which is a more traditional approach, where a certain cycle goes with a certain grade. You have a different content for kindergarten, first, and second, so that’s three different preps.

What COVID taught me is to try and streamline things a little bit. I decided to have a sequence where everybody does the cycle together and I just differentiate between the proficiency levels. So this year, kindergarten, first, and second grade are all starting with ¡Qué lindo! that I just released. Next school year, Kindergarten, 1st and 2nd will all do Ciclo de Criaturas (to be released in the future).This reduces the amount of preps. It also allows me to collaborate between classes, and it takes the pressure off me to teach three separate units for K-2. I am a better teacher and I can focus on making one lesson strong instead of juggling 3 lessons.

You can see in this excerpt below from a ¡Qué lindo! activity, I have written adaptations that target Novice-Low which is my kindergarteners and a Novice-Mid which is my first and second graders. There are adaptations included for every activity and I provided a lot of the presentations in Novice-Llow and Novice-Mid versions with directions so that you can differentiate between your K-2 classes.

For 3-5, you can see that on the left is my first two grading periods. Then on the right is the other 2 grading periods (We have 4 grading periods of 9 weeks each). I use ¡Cuéntame! and Somos for these grades. I start with unit one Dice, and then I’ll go into ¡Cuéntame!. I really like “Dice” a lot because it’s a very good start of the year kind of unit but then I switch over to ¡Cuéntame! which is a nice bridge going into Somos which can be very literature based. I actually do a review of Dice for fourth and fifth grade. We introduce the new kindergarteners, because that’s a big deal at our school and so it’s a nice review. We introduce their teacher to them, the kindergarteners, and any new students. 

In fourth grade, I move on into more Somos units. Notice I’m going faster with them. I’m considering doing more ¡Cuéntame! and I just need to look at it, but I really start using more Somos in fourth and fifth grade, because my students are stronger readers. I do start some Senor Wooly in fifth grade. I do unit seven with fifth grade which takes a really long time to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot of abstract concepts that are going to take some time but are so important. Then if you notice, at the end of fifth grade, second semester I don’t do Somos, I do a novel and Soy Yo Interviews. It can also be used as a back to school activity. They make a card with their name and they give me three things that they like to do and we interview and we write it up and then they can read it. If you look at fourth grade, you’ll notice that I skipped from unit four to unit six and in between that I replaced unit five, which I find inappropriate for 4th graders content wise since it discusses boyfriends and girlfriends.  I replace unit 5 with  Comprehensible Classrooms’s unit on Felipe and the royal family of Spain. We talk about their family, and I think it’s a really nice switch. I focus more on the content than the grammar notes about using “de” for possession. I love teaching Capibara con botas and Brandon Brown series, so I have considered teaching one series in one grade and the other in the other grade. However I have also considered cycling them over two years so I am teaching one series to 4th and 5th grade at the same time and then teaching the other series to 4th and 5th grade the next school year.

Sixth through eighth grade is a little bit more complicated. Notice this is where the grammar starts coming in. For sixth grade, I started with unit 8 La comida Latina and the Peru curriculum from Storyteller’s cornerSo that is my year at a glance. Watch the video above for more details and explanations. Like I said, this is a work in progress, but it’s a good starting point. Share your questions, your comments, your aha moments, and your ideas. I’d love to hear the journey of your curriculum and how that has been laid out. Happy new school year!!. Actually, I tried to do this because they are learning about Latin America in their history and social studies class, so I want to make that connection. Right after that I go into subject pronouns. Then I’m really starting to throw in the grammar in seventh and eighth grade, which you can see there. On the chart, you may notice a 3 week section on Day of the Dead for all three grades. I have a three cycle, special holiday section. One of them is Day of the Dad. One of them is Christmas traditions or holiday traditions, doesn’t necessarily have to be Christmas. The third one, I have not created quite yet, but I’m looking at flamenco because I think that’s fun and I studied abroad in Spain. We do a three week study in a cycle. So this year is Day of the Dead; next year will be holidays, and then the next year will be La fiere de abril and flamenco. 

So that is my year at a glance. Watch the video above for more details and explanations. Like I said, this is a work in progress, but it’s a good starting point. Share your questions, your comments, your aha moments, and your ideas. I’d love to hear the journey of your curriculum and how that has been laid out. Happy new school year!!