As you can see, the units that assess part of the Achievement Standard not covered elsewhere are Units 5, 6, 7 and 8.

This doesn’t mean you MUST do the assessments for these units - if there are other assessments you prefer, by all means choose those! As we’ve already seen, if you don’t have the full time allocation, you physically can’t cover everything. The idea is to make an informed decision about the units you choose.

Step 3: Choose and sequence your assessments.

Now you know what percentage of the Achievement Standard you can realistically cover given your time allocation, and which units you may wish to prioritise, you can start to choose your assessments for the bands you teach, and figure out a sequence in which you’ll complete them.

I am a visual person, so I like to get my mapping table from Step 2 and compare it to the assessment overviews in the Band Plan to see which could work.

Below is an example of the assessment overview from the Italian 5-6 Band Plan:

Another tip I have here - which is entirely personal - is to organise your assessment schedule so you have a receptive assessment in Semester 1, and a productive assessment in Semester 2.

I found this particularly helpful in Years 5 and 6, as my students typically found assessments based around listening and/or reading easier, which built their confidence. I also found I could cover the content my students needed more quickly, as it was focused more on vocabulary and listening / reading skills and practice.

By leaving the written assessment until Semester 2, I was actually able to start the unit in the last weeks of Semester 1. My assessments typically had to be finished by Week 7 of Term 2, in line with our reporting schedule. This enabled me to start working on the next unit in weeks 8, 9 and 10, giving me the full 20 weeks in which to prepare my students for the written assessment and have it finished by Week 7 of Term 4.

Looking at the Band Plan, I can see that Units 1 and 7 have listening/reading assessments, so I’ll keep these in mind for Semester 1 of Year 5 and Year 6. Unit 7 has parts of the achievement standard not assessed elsewhere, so it’s definitely a contender.

Assuming I choose these units, I shade the parts of the Achievement Standard this will cover to help me choose which other units might work. Once I highlight the Achievement Standards covered in Units 1 and 7, my mapping table looks like this:

Out of the 17 different parts of the Achievement Standard, 7 are at least partially covered in just these two units. If I choose these assessments, I’m already well on the way to covering at least half of the Achievement Standard! This gives me some flexibility to choose the units for Semester 2 that I think will be the most engaging for my students. Whichever assessments I choose, I know that there will be a written component which will give me a good balance of macro-skills.

Looking at the remaining parts of the Achievement Standard and the corresponding units, Units 2, 6 and 8 jump out at me - Unit 2 because ideally I’d like to have an early band unit for my year 5s and there’s not too much duplication of the Achievement Standard assessed, and Units 6 and 8 because they cover several parts of the Achievement Standard not covered elsewhere.

Looking at the topics, these units cover family (Unit 2), comic characters (Unit 6) and life changes (Unit 8). Out of these topics, I think Units 2 and 6 have the potential to be engaging, so I’m going to highlight these in my mapping table.

As you can see, this only leaves 4 out of 17 parts of the Achievement Standard that I won’t be assessing - and considering I have less than 50% of the recommended time, I am happy to be able to cover so much of the Achievement Standard from just 4 assessments!

To summarise, my overall plan for my Year 5 and Year 6 students looks like this:

Step 4: Establish the key learning for your chosen assessments.

Once you’ve chosen and sequenced your assessments, the next step is to figure out how you’re going to get your students equipped with the knowledge they need to tackle them.

As my starting point, I take a look at the assessment and identify what language and structures come up. I use this information to identify broad topic areas which will form the basis of my teaching sequence.

Let’s use the assessment for Unit 1 as an example.

I go straight to the Guide to Making Judgements (GTMJ) so I can see what I’ll be looking for when I’m marking the assessment:

Under Communicating, I can see that my students will need to know greetings, asking about and giving names, plus other details from the text. This is a bit vague, but looking at the assessment text I can see that the speakers introduce themselves and discuss the origins of their names. At first glance it looks like the vocabulary topics I’ll need to cover are introductions, the different names we may have (first name, last name, nickname etc), people in our family, and the origins of names (including countries).

Under Understanding, I can see that my students will need to know about naming practices, gender of Italian names, and dialects, and they will need to compare languages and cultures. I can see that I will need to cover how Italian names work (including the gender of names), cultural approaches and conventions around naming children, and comparison skills. I can also see that I will need to give students some information about the existence of dialects in Italy.

From this, I can start drafting an initial list of topics:

• Meeting new people (greetings, introductions)
• Who’s in our family?
• Where do our names come from? (People, countries)
• Italian names (gender, family name traditions)
• Dialects in Italy (including an introduction to regional Italy)
• Comparing cultures

This has the potential to be accessible even to students who begin Italian in Year 5, because it covers some of the ‘traditional’ starting points of greetings, self-introductions and family. It also includes an introduction to Italian culture and to the grammatical convention of gender in an accessible and relatable way.

Step 5: Resource your unit.

Once you have a rough idea of the topics you need to cover, you can decide whether you want to use the C2C lessons, create your own from scratch, or adapt the C2C lessons to work with your teaching style and your allocated teaching time.

I understand that not everyone will work in the same way when it comes to planning or resourcing their lessons. My personal preference is to create a powerpoint to support the lesson sequence so I don’t have to spend valuable time writing too much up on the board. Also, a consideration for my planning was that my students had an exercise book rather than a laptop.

The following process assumes that each lesson will have a detailed slideshow to present the key learning. If that’s not how you like to work, you may need to adapt this process so it works for you.

I am sure everyone has their own perspective on the C2C resources, and as previously mentioned, the purpose of this document is not to pass judgement. No matter what you think of the C2C resources, they do have some positive points which you may be able to leverage to your advantage:

• They already exist so you don’t have to start from scratch, saving you time.
• The avatar characters are cute!
• The interactive resources are useful for teaching listening skills, and are well-supported with images.
• The documents are editable, so you can add animations and pictures, and add or delete slides - whatever you like!

I have sometimes combined content from multiple C2C presentations, cherry-picking the best bits, and adding slides with mini-activities to practise the new content. For other topics that I didn’t feel were covered sufficiently in the resources, or for topics where my students didn’t have the assumed prior knowledge, I created my own presentations - such as to teach the vocabulary for countries and nationalities in Italian.

Let’s take a look at the C2C lessons for this unit, and compare it to the topics I want to cover:

There is some potential overlap, so I can start by looking at the powerpoints for these C2C lessons to see if there are any sections I feel I could use.

I’d like to include a note here about the C2C Languages ‘Making connections with prior learning’ slideshows. I have often adapted these to teach the content from scratch, as I know for my students it’s not actually prior learning. I’d like to share with you how I turned these ‘prior learning’ slideshows from Unit 1 of the 5-6 Band into resources that teach the content for the first time.

Unit 1 has two Prior Learning slideshows that cover a lot of information. As this would all be new content for my classes, I needed to prioritise. I went through both and pulled out the sections I thought could work for my topic list in the table above - asking and giving your name and age from slideshow 1, and asking about birthdays, where you live and family from slideshow 2.

I changed the wording of the slides to reflect the fact that my students may not have learned this language before, exchanging phrases like “Do you remember how to say…” for questions such as “Can you spot how to say…”

I then supplemented this with extra information about numbers and months, and added activities to allow students to practise the phrases with each other. And just like that, I had the foundations of a lesson (or series of lessons) on self-introductions.

I then checked through the remaining resources - even the ones that initially didn’t look like they would overlap. Sometimes I have just taken one section out of one C2C powerpoint and popped it into a different one, or I have created some “mash up” slideshows by mixing and matching different C2C sections with my own. You can be as creative as you want - and use as much or as little of the C2C slideshows as you like.

And remember, as long as in the assessment the students can understand the main points of a spoken or written text, are aware of dialects, and can show that different countries have different cultures and customs, they are on track to meet the C grade benchmark.

That almost brings us to the end of our C2C Adaptation tips. I hope that this information will assist all my wonderful Languages colleagues out there to work with the C2C resources in a way that helps rather than hinders!

But wait… There’s more!

BONUS INFORMATION: How to adapt the C2C interactive resources

The C2C slideshows aren’t the only resource you can change to suit your style - you can also adapt the interactive resources. While the interactive resources in themselves aren’t easily editable, when you download these resources the accompanying folders are a goldmine of images and sound files that you can easily reuse, as long as you know what to find where!

The folder that contains the interactive resource also contains several sub-folders which house the resource’s components - the images, the audio and the behind-the-scenes wizardry that turns them into an interactive resource. The folder for the interactive texts look something like this:

The folder I would like to draw your attention to is the assets folder. This is where you’ll find the images and the audio to go with each individual page:

You can use these individual images and audio clips to make a shorter version of the interactive resource - perhaps if you want to zero in on a particular part of a conversation for a short listening activity, or if you just don’t have time to go through the whole thing.

You can easily insert the images and audio into a slideshow to create your own interactive resource. Just go to the Insert tab at the top and you can either insert a picture or audio from your computer.

If you are quite tech savvy, you can even edit the audio using programs like Audacity. This is especially useful for the resources where one audio file goes with several images.

And that’s a wrap for our C2C Adaptation Tips! We really hope you find the ideas useful, but as always if you have any feedback or suggestions we’d love to hear from you!