First, I don’t love summer… I don’t love the heat. I used to, when I was a kid, but now, meh. I don’t love it. But I do like summer as a teacher. It affords me some time to return to my language nerd self and research some new ideas and resources for instruction.

The last few days I’ve been re-visiting some blogs that I helped me get going in CI for the first few years, and still now! Through an older post from Ignite Language (by Diane Neubauer), I found the Miniature Calendar!

This is perfect for me now… I am heading into a new school this August. This, of course, comes with a new curriculum which I am spending this month trying to figure out how I can retain my CI teaching self yet still meet required learning objectives/give required grammar assessments within thematic units. So… I think this Miniature Calendar can help me.

Because the curriculum units at my new school are thematic, which I have worked with in the past to a certain degree (through Huellas, Carrie Toth’s stellar curriculum–I don’t want to give this curriculum up but I must! 😦 ). I love how this calendar is sorted by themes (YESSSS!). There are several about housework (so I have a home renovations thematic unit), sports and school (I have a teenage daily life thematic unit), and, of course, food!

I am hoping I can motivate students to get engaged with this and ideally, we could use it everyday for non-targeted CI Picture Talk, but we will see with time allowance with adjusting to a new curriculum. I would rather use it as part of a routine, but it may have to fall into the thematic units and used sporadically.

I love the image above and already created simple questions to generate engagement and a backstory: Who is the boy? Is he eating breakfast or lunch? What does he eat? Is bread his favorite food? Is bread your favorite food? Does he live in a bread house? Would you live in a bread house? What’s under his feet? Where is he going? Does he eat his backpack? So many story possibilities!

How late am I to this resource party? Do you use the Miniature Calendar as a resource? How do you use it? Let me know in the comments!

I am so happy I found this! Thank you, Diane Neubauer for sharing on your blog (now a while ago!).