español (Spanish)

KINDERGARTEN and 1st GRADE

We learned our colors in Spanish through read alouds, songs, videos, and coloring activities. Then we moved on to describing things by color in Spanish. We learned that, unlike in English, in Spanish the color comes after the object it is describing. For example: white dog in Spanish is perro blanco. We will build on this as we learn to use other adjectives, including shapes and numbers, to describe things in Spanish.

2nd + 3rd GRADE

We started out our family unit by discussing our own families. We talked about how every family looks a little bit different, and generated a list of family members in English that we wanted to be able to talk about in Spanish so we could describe our own families and other people's families. We listened to songs and watched videos about families. We also read a classic piece of literature from Aesop's Fables in Spanish: El Manojo de Palos (Bundle of Sticks) that involves a conflict between family members. We looked for cognates (words that sound similar in English and Spanish), as well as vocabulary we already knew. This helped our students see that they can read so much more Spanish on their own than they thought! Translating line-by-line and discussing the story helped boost our reading comprehension skills in both languages.

4th + 5th GRADE 

We learned vocabulary and grammar structures to help us describe ourselves and others physically. We started out by finding examples of celebrities and cartoon characters with physical attributes written about them in Spanish, then using our context clues and knowledge of Spanish to determine what those characteristics were. Students took notes where they translate physical characteristics from English into Spanish, then created a symbol or drawing to help them remember the meaning. Students also drew a character that they loved from television, film, or books (or invented their own) and described them physically.