Unit 1 — Greetings and Farewells and Ask and State Feelings
Description
Students learn culturally appropriate greetings, farewells, and ways to express feelings in Spanish. The unit emphasizes understanding when and how to convey messages to different audiences and recognizes that body language varies across cultures. Through dialogues, skits, and songs, students practice memorized exchanges and develop awareness of formal and informal greetings used within Spanish-speaking families.
Essential Questions
- Why is it important to greet someone when you meet them?
- How do we communicate about feelings with someone who speaks Spanish?
- How does body language vary from country to country?
Learning Objectives
- Respond to simple questions on very familiar topics using memorized words and phrases
- Share basic needs using gestures and visuals
- Tell others basic preferences and feelings using memorized phrases
- React to procedural instructions and commands in classroom situations
- Enact culturally authentic gestures when greeting and during leave-takings
- Identify memorized words in culturally authentic materials with visual support
- Recognize common gestures associated with target cultures
Supplemental Resources
- Sticky notes for labeling feelings and emotions
- Chart paper for displaying greeting phrases and cultural notes
- Index cards with dialogue sentence strips for practice activities
Interpersonal Mode
Interpretive Mode
Presentational Mode
Communication Modes
Students develop vocabulary and language conventions through dialogue creation, written paragraphs describing classroom objects and family members, and reading comprehension activities using Spanish text.
Students explore cultural diversity and global perspectives through study of Spanish-speaking countries, family structures and traditions across cultures, clothing and dress customs, calendar and holiday celebrations, and climate differences in various regions.
Formative Assessments
- Oral dialogues between students using greeting and feeling expressions
- Physical responses to oral commands and directions
- Teacher observation of students using culturally authentic gestures
Summative Assessment
Create a written dialogue using at least five greeting and feeling expressions, perform the dialogue with a partner, and read a dialogue responding to true/false comprehension questions
Benchmark Assessment
— not configured —
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through a teacher-led conversation using visual supports such as emotion cards or picture cues to express greetings and feelings, rather than creating a written dialogue. Sentence frames in Spanish and English may be provided to support oral responses.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students benefit from visual supports such as picture cards or illustrated phrase charts pairing greeting and feeling expressions with images and gestures to reduce reliance on memory alone. Oral and physical responses should be accepted as demonstrations of understanding, and students may use gesture or point to visuals rather than produce spoken phrases independently when needed. For the summative dialogue task, consider allowing dictation, use of a sentence frame template, or a reduced number of required expressions to keep the focus on demonstrating communicative understanding rather than written production. Frequent check-ins during practice activities help students build confidence before performing exchanges with a partner.
Section 504
Students should be seated in a low-distraction area during listening and dialogue practice activities, as auditory processing of a new language benefits from reduced background noise. Extended time may be provided for the summative performance and written dialogue task, and a printed copy of any modeled phrase structures should be available so students are not relying solely on what is written on the board. These access supports allow students to focus their cognitive effort on the Spanish language content itself.
ELL / MLL
Visual cues such as illustrated greeting and feeling cards, culturally relevant images, and gesture demonstrations are especially valuable for multilingual learners navigating a third language in this unit. Teachers should offer simplified, step-by-step directions for dialogue and skit activities and invite students to make connections between greetings and social expressions they recognize from their home language or culture. Pre-teaching key vocabulary with visual support before introducing dialogues or songs helps build the familiarity students need to participate meaningfully in oral exchanges.
At Risk (RTI)
Connecting new greeting and feeling phrases to students' everyday social interactions — such as how they greet family members or express how they feel at school — provides an accessible entry point into the unit's memorized language. Providing sentence frames and illustrated phrase banks reduces the cognitive load of recalling new vocabulary from scratch, allowing students to focus on practicing communication rather than retrieval. Shorter, structured practice exchanges with a trusted partner before whole-class or performance tasks can help build the confidence students need to participate actively.
Gifted & Talented
Students who quickly internalize memorized greeting and feeling phrases can be encouraged to explore how the same social exchange shifts in formality, tone, or gesture depending on the relationship between speakers or the Spanish-speaking region — moving beyond correct production toward sociolinguistic awareness. They might investigate how a specific cultural greeting or farewell custom compares across two or more Spanish-speaking countries and bring that comparison into their dialogue performance. Encouraging these students to compose original exchanges that go beyond the modeled phrases, or to take on a peer coaching role during dialogue practice, deepens engagement without simply adding more of the same content.