When I need to take a break during a story and re-energize a bit, I sometimes do so in the following way:
If, in a story, I use a new word, I of course write it on the board and pause and point to it. I would normally then continue on with the story. However, if I feel like taking a “spelling break” from the story, I would just ask the kids how the word or phrase in question is spelled. Here is an example:
Class, the bird ate the butterfly!
I go to the board and write down:
papillon – butterfly
pausing and pointing for the new information to sink in.
Then, and this is where I take my break, I ask:
Comment est-ce que ça s’écrit, classe?/How is that spelled, class?
Then I just spell out P-A-P-I-L-L-O-N on the board, pointing to each letter, and they respond chorally, individually, etc.
The kids like doing this. It is excellent for first year classes. Not only is it a good break from the work of creating the story for me, it is also a good review of the alphabet for them.
Why teach the alphabet with the alphabet song thing? It only creates the illusion of learning a language, in the same way that learning individual words does almost nothing to help the student actually acquire the language. When letters and words are part of something greater, part of the flow of language, then they are retained.
An option on this activity is to ask, besides how it is spelled, how the word in question is pronounced. I also like to ask how many letters there are in the word. For practice in ordinal numbers, I ask what the first, second, etc. letter of the word is.