El Calendario: Topic & Purpose

November 3, 2015

This unit on El Calendario is a unit that serves as a perfect lesson to carry out early in a school
year. It exposes students to various aspects of Hispanic culture that pertain to the calendar. This
includes aspects of the Hispanic and American calendar as they are compared and contrasted. The
vocabulary for the unit incorporates dates, days of the week, months of the year, holidays, and other
phrases so that students may learn how to express these basic ideas in a different language to others.
This unit is important because it allows students to continue broadening their knowledge of the Spanish
language so they may become more familiar with the language, noticing some patterns in the speech.
Furthermore, Spanish is beneficial for use in conversations in society and in future Spanish lessons and
classes. Specifically, this unit further exposes students to the format of grammatical structures. This will
be useful in further units where there is a stronger emphasis on grammar and conjugation.
The main issue or questions in this unit pertain to comparison and contrasting between English
and Spanish cultures. There is a different grammatical structure and cultural qualities that set the two
settings apart. The big questions in this unit, then, are constantly along the lines of How does my
culture compare to the one being studied: Spanish? Students ought to have this in the back of their
minds so that they gain a wider worldview. Similarly, unit concepts connect to students lives in this way.
Through a constant comparison and contrast so that the beauty in both contexts and cultures are seen
in a way that allows the learners to make connections. Then, the content is addressed in a way that the
topic is linked to the broader curricular scope & sequence and to the age, ability, and interests of the
students because the students are frequently asking or being asked questions that make them look to
other aspects of their lives that they can relate to the new language being learned. Therefore, looking at
the Unit Planning Overview, it is evident that there is a good number of standards and concepts that
must be met for this unit. Each standard will deal with one of the following: comfortably speaking the
language; comparing holidays, traditions, and other family celebrations; and expressing a knowledge for
the difference between grammatical and vocabulary structures in your language and the foreign

El Calendario: Topic & Purpose

November 3, 2015

language. When these standards are met by the corresponding goals, a student can have a beautifully
expanded picture of the world around him or her.