I wanted to pull in culture into the Report of the Day as well, so when you look at the presentation you will see that when we discuss weather, time, day of the week, season, etc. it is done picking a different Spanish-Speaking country each time. This way students can keep track of a new country and capital on their map that they label each day, see the time zones the countries are in when they tell the time for the city (in military time which helps students become more comfortable with that as well), identify what the season would be in that area of the world, read a weather map in Spanish, thus interacting with an authentic resource for a useful purpose, and identify clothing they would need based on the weather (helping reinforce the importance of seasonal knowledge for travel). Students who find the regular weather expressions more basic have been able to start expanding their weather vocabulary through the reading of the real weather report in Spanish which has been an added benefit as well. The last part of the report is chose an activity they would recommend for the day based on the weather. Here is another opportunity to pull in any cultural information you know about the country, even any basic information about which sports would be popular in the country.
To scaffold during our discussion, at first I have been writing down the answers for students to transfer to the report sheet. There are three versions of the sheet. The first sheet offers more support to students, whereas the last one just leaves space to record by the end. Here are a few map sheets I use: (Central America, South America, Caribbean). Since the reports are very small sheets of paper and they have a lot of help at first, they are easy to collect and check over to return to students for timely feedback.
As an aside, I also used Martina Bex's story, Paul va a Hawaii that comes in the ¿Qué hora es? lesson to help reinforce time expressions before doing a final assessment to check comprehension of time. It was a good final touch for the previous basic practice we had done.
Elena also does a report of the day more consistently and uses a different set of focus questions per quarter to help build thematic vocabulary in a meaningful way. Some examples she has are talking about what students had for breakfast, lunch and dinner among others.