Unit Planning: The Ultimate Guide to Physical Descriptions Activities Level 1

If you’re planning a unit with French physical descriptions activities or personality traits, this is the post for you. We’re going to dive deep into what I like to call your planning-partner-in-your-pocket!

Welcome to this series on unit ideas for world language. We will especially focus on levels 1 and 2.

Think about this as an idea session for when you know you have a unit coming up and you want simple ideas for how you can make it more proficiency-oriented, more fun, more joyful, and more practical. This is that lovely planning session that you wish you had with your awesome colleagues, but right here in your earbuds. Let’s go!

These unit idea mini-sodes are so much fun for me, and if you’re teaching an upcoming unit and you need some ideas for it, feel free to let me know. Contact me and let me know what new units you have coming up, and I would love to do a mini-sode about it.

But without further ado, this one in particular is all about the skill of describing. For many of you in Level 1, that comes through some sort of physical or personality traits unit.

Why a Physical Description Unit? The ACTFL 2024 Performance Indicators

Let’s get into it. First of all, why do we even do this unit with physical description activities in French 1 or Spanish 1? It seems like an interesting choice for Level 1, so I wanted to give you some context as to why this is such a common unit in either your proficiency-based curriculum or your textbook (which claims to be proficiency—TBD on the publisher!).

Let’s look first at the language functions for ACTFL that came out through the new performance descriptors released in 2024, just last year. They’re brand spanking new and they are so good. It makes it a lot easier to understand what ACTFL is expecting of us when we’re working with students at each level.

The skill we are honing in on here is the ability to describe someone or something, which is a key novice skill. It’s one of the big performance-indicating skills. If you look at the ACTFL Guiding Principles:

• If a student can describe barely, and it’s in list form, they are Novice Low.
• If they can do it but with a lack of confidence and need a lot of scaffolding, they are Novice Mid.
• If they can do it confidently in a few (maybe not so original) sentences, then they are Novice High.

This is a free ACTFL-based tool to help you organize your Level 1 units for Spanish or French class.

Description is the key indicator of what type of “Novice” your student is. It is the focal point of what a novice is capable of doing.

Whether you are describing ice cream or a person, it doesn’t matter, as long as they are working towards the skill of describing something in their immediate environment.

The “Spheres” of Language Transition

In the ACTFL performance indicators, language functions start with the self and move into others and the environment. Describing physical and personality traits fits into that crucial transition from being all about themselves to describing another person.

Think of it as jumping through spheres:

1. Me, Myself, and I: The first sphere.
2. My Immediate Environment: The next one.
3. People I Know: The third sphere.
4. The World in General: This is where you get into multiple timeframes and moods.

For your students to jump from the first sphere to the second, they need the skill of description. We often miss this in curriculum development.

We say, “Okay, they can do lists, now they need phrases, now they need sentences.” But where is the transition? Describing themselves and others in the same unit allows them to make that jump because you’re working with that familiar “Yo/Je” language they’ve used for months and moving it into “He/She/They.”

It’s a natural transition. So, how can we make that description piece very real-world and compelling?

Let’s talk about the pros and cons of using French physical descriptions activities or personality traits in your class, depending on the age group you’re working with.

The Teenager Problem: Making it Compelling

Describing yourself is a real-world skill, but how do we make it wildly interesting? This is where the fun comes in. Why not describe really interesting people?

First, think: Who would be interesting to your students?

Depending on the age group, the answer changes. If you are in elementary school, 6 and 7-year-olds love nothing more than talking about themselves. 10 and 11-year-olds really want to talk about their friends and family.

But middle schoolers and high schoolers? They are absolutely fascinated by other people, but they do not want to talk about themselves at all. It’s a weird transition phase. They don’t want eyes on them. Think about yourself at age 16—did you want to talk in-depth about what you look like? Probably not! Give them that same grace.

I like to make this unit about famous people. I like to add a sociocultural learning element by talking about famous people from the target culture. This is a great opportunity to dive into that.

Side note: if you’re doing a unit on French physical descriptions activities that doesn’t really include personality traits, I would add in personality traits. These key descriptors are more common than physical descriptions in common speech. More on that below.

The Grammar Sidebar: Masculine, Feminine, and Adjective Agreement

I want to give you a huge hint here: If you are going into this unit thinking, “Yes! This is where I finally hit masculine and feminine agreement!”—I want to caution you.

Don’t spend too much time on this in the novice area. Masculine and feminine agreement is something your students will need to revisit multiple times in a spiral program. The rules are simple, but being able to produce the rule accurately is a different story.

Flip the Script with Pop-Up Grammar

Instead of explaining the rule for 40 minutes, show them. If you give them four biographies—two men, two women—they will notice the adjectives are spelled differently. They will eventually pick up on the idea and ask you what it is.

• Pop-up Grammar: You say, “Look at the adjective for ‘friendly’ or ‘athletic.’ What do you see on the end? Do you see instances where it doesn’t change?” It will be much more of a success when they actually care about it because they’ve seen it in context. Instead, focus on the skill of being able to describe a person in a few disjointed sentences. That is a novice-mid/high goal. Accuracy in endings comes later.

French Physical Descriptions Activities: From “Guess Who” to Mr. Potato Head

What are some activities you can do? This is the fun part! You should do tons of examples of you describing other people. Here are my fave French physical descriptions activities (that of course work in any language):

1. Celebrity Slide Decks: Every teacher has a slide deck of 30 pictures of random celebrities. Do games like Guess Who, where you describe a celebrity and they have to identify them.
2. Movie Characters: Describe the “Bad Guy” vs. the “Good Guy” in a movie they all know.
3. Pictionary Description: Describe a person in detail and see if the students can draw them accurately based only on your input. This helps build their capacity to hear complete sentences.
4. Mr. Potato Head Tactile Description: Bring in a Mr. Potato Head. List the character and physical traits and have students build or draw it. It’s so fun!
5. Dating App Profiles: This is hilarious for high schoolers. Have them do a profile for themselves or a fictional person where they describe themselves to look “real good.”
6. The Coin Flip Body Outline: I used to use an activity from a TPT creator (let me know if it’s you!) where you have a sketch of a human being and you flip a coin. The coin flip decides the traits—tall, short, curly hair, green eyes—and the students draw the “Frankenstein” result.

A Note on Body Positivity

If the idea of doing physical descriptions activities makes you feel like, “I don’t know if I want to do that,”—then skip it! It’s not that important. Y

ou don’t have to spend a ton of time on physical traits. In a diverse classroom, talking about bodies can be difficult. You won’t fail to interact with a native speaker if you don’t know the word for eye color.

Focus on character traits (artistic, shy, outgoing) instead. Those are much more useful for real connection.

Ready-Made Resources: Save Your Prep Time

If you’re looking for ways to make this easier on you, I have ready-made activities in my curriculum library that you can use right now.

For French Teachers: Multimodal Card Game

I have a French Physical Descriptions Activities Card Game and card set ready for you. When I used this with my students, they would get these cut-up task cards.

• The Match-Up: One side has a picture of a student (middle-school-friendly anime style!), and the other card has three written descriptions in simple French.
• Multimodal Options: There are 32 full-color and 32 black-and-white cards. You can do an individual “match-up” activity or a partner Info-Gap where one person describes the image and the other matches it.
• It’s ready for Novice Lows and it focuses on clear, consistent imagery. Prep it once, cut the cards, and it’s ready forever.
• For reference: It lasted me 2 90-minute block periods in high school French 1.

For Spanish Teachers: Hispanic Icons & Famous People

Inside my Practical Proficiency Curriculum, I have a full unit exactly on this idea: Spanish 1, Unit 3: Famous People. * The Sequence: Lesson 1 is basic description. Lesson 2 is understanding a variety of people. Lesson 3 moves to output—describing a famous person in detail. Lesson 4 is the comparison—comparing themselves to others.

• The Editable Slide Deck: You get 30+ biographies of the Latino/Latina/Latine community—activists, athletes, writers, and artists. You get everyone from Frida Kahlo to scientists your students haven’t heard of yet. The text boxes are editable so you can tweak the language to your specific level!

The Instagram Project

This is my favorite final project. Available for both Spanish and French, it’s a template for an Instagram Biography Project. It has the instructions, the rough draft options, and a ready-made list of famous people for them to research. Most importantly, it has sentence starters so they won’t be doing this all on their own.

Building Your Joyful System

I hope you got a bunch of great unit ideas from this! Whether you’re doing physical traits or focusing on character, remember that you are the “Party Host” of your classroom. Your job is to make the language accessible and the content compelling.

If you’re sitting there thinking, “Devon, I love these ideas, but I need a system to make this transition actually work,” I invite you to join us in the Practical Proficiency Network. We have a full and robust library of trainings, including a full course on transitioning to proficiency with a focus on sustainability and self-care. Plus you get ALL of my resources – almost 200 ready to go lessons!

And don’t forget to grab my FREE audio workshop: The Joyful CI Classroom System. It’s a 100% audio training—perfect for your commute—where I show you how to lead a language-rich class that gets real results without the burnout.

Click here to get the FREE audio training!

Thank you so much for being here for this mini-sode. I hope you have so much fun doing French physical descriptions activities with your students this week.

Bye for now!