This paper presents one proposal for teaching the foundations of object oriented programming using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as one modeling language and Java as one object oriented programming language. Unlike other approaches where only two types of UML diagrams are used with the intention of transferring them to a codification (class diagram and sequence diagram, or class diagram and statechart diagram), this proposal uses tree types of UML diagrams: class diagram, sequence diagram and activity diagram, for modeling basic programming problems. This is with the intention of facilitating to the student the transition between the diagrams used to model one solution and its final codification in one programming language.