Unit 4 — ¿Cómo eres y cómo es tu familia? (All about me and my family)
Description
In this unit for grades 6-8, students learn to describe themselves, their family, and friends in Spanish. Students practice expressing feelings, emotions, and states of being using the verbs ser, estar, and tener. The unit emphasizes that Spanish speakers conceptualize being and feeling as different states requiring different verbs. Students compare and contrast physical appearance and personality traits across cultures, recognizing that Spanish speakers are as diverse as people from any other background. The unit also explores family structures in Spanish-speaking cultures, including the importance of extended family and elder members, and examines naming traditions in Spanish-speaking countries where people often have long names with two surnames.
Essential Questions
- How does one express feelings, emotions, and states of being in the target language?
- How do you describe ideas and objects in Spanish and how is that similar to describing people?
- How is the physical appearance of Latin people similar and different to that of Americans and others from around the world?
- How is a Spanish-speaking family similar and different from that of a U.S. family?
- How are children named in Spanish-speaking countries and what do legal names look like?
Learning Objectives
- Use ser, estar, and tener to describe physical characteristics and personality traits
- Express feelings and states of being using appropriate verb forms
- Ask and answer questions about personal characteristics and emotions
- Describe family members using adjectives and verb conjugations
- Compare and contrast personal characteristics with family members or other people
- Understand cultural perspectives on family structure and naming conventions
- Recognize gender and number agreement in Spanish descriptions
- Create personal descriptions and family narratives using simple sentences
Supplemental Resources
- Index cards with situation prompts for role-play activities
- Chart paper for displaying descriptive vocabulary and verb conjugations
- Markers and colored pencils for creating visual representations of family members or self-portraits
Interpersonal Mode
Interpretive Mode
Presentational Mode
Students engage in writing and reading activities across all units, including writing descriptions, creating narratives, reading authentic passages, and expressing ideas through written communication in Spanish and English.
Students explore Spanish-speaking countries, their cultures, customs, families, schools, and lifestyles. Learning includes geographic awareness, cultural practices, and understanding diverse perspectives from target language communities.
Students create posters, presentations, skits, songs, and visual projects. They engage in dramatization, creative expression, and perform cultural activities that integrate music and performance.
Students examine climate change, environmental awareness, and recycling practices in Spanish-speaking communities. Topics include weather, animals, natural resources, and geography-related concepts.
Students use mathematics in practical contexts including time telling, ordinal numbers, counting, measuring, creating floor plans with scale, and interpreting quantitative data.
Students utilize digital tools and applications including Flipgrid, Edpuzzle, Duolingo, Quizlet, Google Tools, YouTube, and other web-based platforms for language learning, research, and project creation.
Formative Assessments
- Partner interviews asking and answering questions about appearance and feelings
- Listening activities identifying personality traits and states of being from descriptions
- Writing activities describing self, family members, and other people
- Drawing activities where partners describe people for others to draw
- Role-play activities such as doctor-patient interactions discussing states of being
- Reading passages with comprehension questions about personal descriptions
Summative Assessment
Assessment transfer task requiring students to write and present essays describing themselves or family members, compare and contrast themselves with others, present their creations to the class, develop skits based on situation cards while classmates identify emotions, write descriptions of others, and read passages answering comprehension questions
Benchmark Assessment
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Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through oral descriptions of themselves or family members in response to teacher prompts, with visual supports such as vocabulary cards or labeled images of emotions and physical traits. Students may also respond to written or pictorial prompts with single words or short phrases instead of complete sentences.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students with IEPs may benefit from visual supports such as verb conjugation charts for ser, estar, and tener, illustrated vocabulary cards pairing Spanish descriptive words with images of facial features, emotions, and family roles, and sentence frames to scaffold written and oral descriptions of self and family members. For output, allow students to demonstrate understanding through oral responses, drawing with labeled captions, or dictated descriptions rather than requiring extended independent writing. Break multi-step tasks — such as producing a personal essay and an oral presentation — into smaller, sequenced components with checkpoints, and provide extended time for both formative and summative tasks. Highlight or color-code gender and number agreement patterns to support students in recognizing and applying this grammatical concept across their work.
Section 504
Students with 504 plans should be given extended time on written descriptions and the summative presentation task, as well as access to a low-distraction setting when completing listening activities that require identifying personality traits or states of being. Preferential seating near the teacher during direct instruction on ser, estar, and tener can help students stay oriented to new grammatical content. Providing a printed reference card with key verb forms and adjective vocabulary supports independent work without reducing the rigor of the task.
ELL / MLL
Students who are multilingual learners may draw on their home language as a resource when learning Spanish family vocabulary, personality adjectives, and the cultural concepts of ser versus estar — particularly if their home language makes similar or contrasting grammatical distinctions. Provide visual supports such as labeled family diagrams, illustrated emotion charts, and picture-supported vocabulary lists to make descriptive language concrete and accessible. Offer simplified or chunked directions for tasks involving both reading and writing in Spanish, and allow students additional processing time when responding to comprehension questions or participating in partner conversation activities.
At Risk (RTI)
Students who need additional support should be offered structured entry points into describing self and family, such as partially completed sentence frames using ser, estar, and tener that reduce the cognitive load of simultaneous vocabulary recall and grammar application. Connecting family vocabulary and personality traits to students' own lives and real relationships can increase engagement and help anchor new Spanish terms to familiar concepts. Reduce the complexity of written tasks by focusing first on mastery of one verb at a time before combining all three, and use frequent brief check-ins during activities to catch and correct misunderstandings early before they become patterns.
Gifted & Talented
Students who demonstrate early mastery of ser, estar, and tener distinctions can be challenged to explore the nuanced ways in which these verbs shift meaning in context — for example, how the same adjective paired with ser versus estar conveys fundamentally different states — and to research how other Romance languages handle this conceptual distinction. These students might extend their family narrative work by investigating Spanish-speaking naming traditions in depth across multiple countries, analyzing how dual surnames reflect historical, legal, and cultural identity, and presenting their findings as an enrichment layer alongside the class summative task. Encouraging students to compose more complex, multi-paragraph descriptions that incorporate subordinate clauses, nuanced emotion vocabulary, and cultural commentary pushes beyond foundational objectives into authentic communicative depth.