How to Use Calendar Talk to Provide Comprehensible Input?

A low prep activity that provides tons of comprehensible input and creates community.

According to Second Language Acquisition research, comprehensible input is the essential ingredient to acquire language.  We need to provide tons of comprehensible message to our students.  However, most of our textbooks are not comprehensible input driven.  Most of our curriculum is not comprehensible input driven.  Therefore, even though we have great intentions sometimes we don’t know how to start or where to start, and we only have 24 hrs per day.  I know because I have been there. So, I want to share with you how I started.  I started with Calendar Talk. 

I learned Calendar Talk from Tina Hargaden.  I saw her demo of Calendar Talk on YouTube, and I thought it was so simple that I could try.  My main goal was, and still is, to stay comprehensible 100% during this activity.  So I started one day four years ago, and I haven´t stopped. 

What is Calendar Talk?  It´s a conversation with your students about the day.  We ask about the date, weather, and any important events happening that day or that week.  Nothing special.  Nothing fancy.  Simple language.  

I need to confess that it was so weird at the beginning just to talk to the students about our day, but it was amazing.  Now, even in the middle of the Pandemic and with different types of classes (hybrid, F2F and virtual), I keep doing this activity every day.  These are some reasons why this activity is one of my favorites:

1. I don’t have to plan for these 10 minutes of my classes.  This shouldn’t be my #1 reason but it is now.  I’m tired of planning for all my different preps.  Not only do I teach 3 different classes, but I teach them all of them differently.  Even though I try to streamline, most of my lessons have to be tweaked from class to class except for Calendar Talk. 
2. It’s comprehensible to ALL my students.  Because I use visuals and it’s so simple and repetitive, I know ALL my students are understanding what’s happening during this part of the class.  By now we have our favorite days, and we know the weather.  Even if the rest of the lesson is a disaster, this section is 100% comprehensible to them.  That makes me super happy. These Calendar Talk slides are inside my Back To School Folder, if you´re interested, please click here and subscribe.
3. It builds a positive culture and community! During Calendar Talk, I get to know my students, and they get to know each other.  It´s a great way to build community and culture. I always ask my class ¿Algo importante esta semana? (anything important this week?),  and they share.  At the beginning, I got a lot of silence and it was okay.  I shared about my week and I keep doing that sometimes.  If I don’t share, how can I ask them to share?  Little by little they have started to share more in English or Spanish.   If they share in English, I rephrase it in Spanish but as you can imagine there are some words that we keep repeating so I can see some acquisition already happening. 
4. Great low stake organic conversation:  This is a very low stake organic and authentic conversation with my students. No grades attached.  They just participate because they want.  The affective filter is super low, and that makes this part of my class so enjoyable for all of us.  

Now the question is how.  How do I do Calendar Talk in my class?  Check out this videos to see me doing calendar talk in my Spanish 3 class.  As you can see, the language is pretty simple but we connect and truly enjoy this moment of authentic conversation.

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If you don’t know where to start with CI, my advice is to try Calendar Talk.  This is a pretty difficult year for everyone so this activity may be something that you and your students can enjoy, without the burden of finding or creating a lesson and an assessment.  I would love to know how it goes.