Download 14 weeks of free curriculum and preview the Free Year of Curriculum we have produced for Spanish, English, French, and German, and the Free Semester of Curriculum in Latin and Italian (and three free lessons in Chinese, too!)

The Stepping Stones Curriculum is a complete curriculum designed for in-person instruction and distance learning, and can be used for both live online lessons as well as asynchronous online learning. It can also serve as a basis for hybrid instruction, if you are asked to teach both face-to-face and online simultaneously.

Here you will find 8 sets of Leveled Cognate Readings to use in your classroom!

✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️

About Stepping Stones

Stepping Stones divides the year into six instructional cycles based on language functions:

(1) Description

(2) Narration

(3) Going Deeper with Narration

(4) Information

(5) Opinion,

(6) Argument

Within each of these six-week cycles are four phases, each containing approximately six lessons, a review lesson, and an end-of-cycle performance assessment of interpretive reading, presentational writing, interpretive listening, and interpersonal speaking. Presentational speaking is also an option for performance assessments.

Each phase is thus designed to cover approximately eight days of instruction. But there are so many options that you could also “stretch” the phase to cover about ten, or even twelve, lessons, if need be.

These cycles, phases, and individual lessons are also designed to be modular, meaning that you can skip, replace, or modify any cycle, phase, or lesson, to fit into your instructional calendar or take time to teach other content, such as required common assessments or other content that your department or administrators require.

I designed these materials to be used with the simplest of technology, and without requiring students to provide their email addresses, login to any online systems, or appear on camera for online classes. Protecting student privacy is very important to me. Also, keeping the tech tools simple, few, and free for you, the teacher, to access is important to me.

Your students can participate fully in these lessons by simply accessing the provided Google Forms, which contain visual aids aligned to the instructional materials provided for you on the Padlet. These Google Forms are students’ daily workspace, and contain reading, listening, writing, and word work. They are aligned to the Stepping Stones Daily Instructional Framework, so each form follows the same structure of the lesson, with new content aligned to the day’s lesson. This structure allows you and your students to develop a sense of predictability and calm, and allows you to free up more of your mental energy for teaching, not planning, sequencing, and structuring your instruction. You have access to the editable Google Forms, so that you can modify and adapt them to fit your schedule, content, and other needs.

I have worked hard to make these materials as culturally-sustaining as possible, and to weave into the entire curriculum stories and information that promote students’ critical thinking and sense-making of racial and social injustice. In these materials, you will find ways to have courageous conversations about race with even Beginner classes, and ways to teach about the experiences, perspectives, struggle, resilience, beauty, and joy of Black figures, Indigenous figures, and people of Color from around the Italian-speaking world and right here in the U.S.

Intercultural competence, in my way of thinking, begins by critically examining one’s own culture, so you will find in these materials, across the year, an interweaving of self-reflection on race, color, and our various identities, with an exploration of cultural practices, products, and perspectives from the incredible, fascinating, and rich diversity of the people who comprise the wide world of Spanish speakers. These materials help to bring that richness to your classroom from the very first year, to open windows for your students as well as portray positive, inspiring Black and Indigenous role models and role models of Color from around the globe, in history as well as in our current time.

I am extremely proud of what you will see in this padlet. These materials are beautiful to look at, inviting to the eye, and designed to build students’ literacy in the target language as well as their cross-curricular reading and writing skills. They are fully aligned to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign (or World) Language (ACTFL) standards, performance indicators, and Can-Do Statements. They also incorporate many Common Core Literacy standards and contain cross-disciplinary content that brings in information and habits of mind from social science, history, literacy, knowledge of language forms (grammar) as a concept in context, science, mathematics, physical and human geography, business and careers, and information science.

This is a revolutionary approach to World Language teaching, and I am grateful to be in a position where I can make these materials available at no cost to teachers, tutors, and schools. If you would like more support, including one-on-one coaching, a subscription to our online Curriculum Club membership (a live coaching program that provides unlimited access to all our TpT materials - both the free and the paid ones), or consulting and support for your department or district, please email info@ciliftoff.com and let us know what we can do to support you.

It is my sincere hope that these materials will transform your Spanish program, make comprehension-based, communicative language teaching easy to grasp, concrete, and doable for you, and help you to have a solid foundation and sense of direction this year, to the extent possible, given the ongoing and escalating uncertainty and challenges we face as a planet, a nation, and a profession.

Chin up and happy teaching, dear friends and colleagues!

To listen to a 23-minute podcast I recently recorded on the topic of the current situation and some preliminary thoughts on next year, pleasecheck out this link</a>.

✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️✏️❤️

Follow CI Liftoff on Pinterest to get all the latest about what we’re making for YOU!

These resources were lots of fun to make, and I sincerely hope that it lightens your load this upcoming school year and gives you tools to transform your language program into the future!

If you were in Curriculum Club, everything to support and extend this Starter Curriculum, including almost everything in the TpT store that I have made (or will ever make!) would be FREE!

For more information on our 2020-2021 Curriculum Club, which closes November 12, 2020, please visit this link. If you have questions on Curriculum Club or any of our other resources, please email help@ciliftoff.com.

Follow CI Liftoff on Pinterest to get all the latest about our TpT products!

Happy teaching, mis queridos, queridos colegas!

Total Pages

Answer Key

N/A

Teaching Duration

N/A

Report this resource to TPT

Reported resources will be reviewed by our team. Report this resource to let us know if this resource violates TPT’s content guidelines.

Reviews

Questions & Answers

CI Liftoff

See all 355 resources

1.9k Followers