3rd and 4th Grade Excellence

"What do you call someone who speaks several languages?"
--"Multilingual."
"What do you call someone who speaks two languages?"
--"Bilingual."
"What do you call someone who only speaks one language?"
--"American."

Sadly, that joke contains an element of truth, and I think that one reason that so few people in the United States are fluent in other languages is that, in most cases, there is no serious study of other languages until high school.  Although many schools offer it in elementary and middle school, there is often an unspoken assumption that the kids can't really learn much--just numbers, colors, maybe the names of some animals or parts of the body.

After fifteen years of teaching college students and seeing first-hand how challenging it is for students who wait to learn another language as an adult, I cannot describe my joy when Mrs. Scalet described the program here at All Saints.  Our students have Spanish at least twice a week from pre-K on.   That frequency allows us to go beyond a few basic nouns.  The children here are actually speaking Spanish, with oral sections on every test from the third grade and up.  We aren't just going over isolated nouns--they are conjugating verbs and using prepositions and the correct gender of adjectives to create complete sentences.

Excellent work from Samantha, 4-B

The last couple of weeks my third and fourth graders have been learning the present indicative forms of the verb ir, the prepositional phrases al and a la, and a number of place names in Spanish.  Today they combined those elements with the days of the week and the definite articles to express where they go throughout the week.

To give you some perspective on this, most of the college Spanish programs that I know don't teach this until about the third or fourth chapter, and then we typically see students struggling to remember to use the definite article to express doing something on a certain day, or forgetting to contract a and el to make al for masculine destinations or mixing up the gender.  These third and fourth grade students sailed through it without any problems at all (and they even remembered the accent marks on miércoles and sábado--those little things that delight the hearts of Spanish teachers everywhere).

Caitlin and Austin practicing the places with a board game.

Dani, Taylor and Ariana were the fastest group to find all the words in the sentence, and JP is the fastest photo-bomber.  :)

Jake, Nick and Owen

Kids have such a great way of living up or down to the expectations and opportunities given to them! When you expect excellence and give them the chance to learn more, they rise to the occasion.   I look forward to the day when students all over the US have a chance to really learn other languages, and I am delighted that we don't have to wait for that here at All Saints.

Country in a Bag Project

One of our projects this year in collaborative work between sixth and second graders has been our Country in a Bag project.  The students picked different Spanish-speaking countries and teamed up to research their country's history, culture, typical foods, favorite sports, famous citizens and more.  They decorated their bags with images to represent their countries and filled them with puppets, items from the country, such as coffee beans, bananas, sand from the islands, baseballs or soccer balls, and all kinds of interesting things.

However, we all agreed that it is not enough to hear about another country--it is important to experience aspects of the culture, as well.  So the students studied the cuisine for their countries, selected a recipe, and then brought food from their country to share with the classes!  It was absolutely delicious, and so much fun!  

I was so impressed with all of the information that the students learned and shared about each of the countries.  We focus most of our class time on the grammar and vocabulary of Spanish, but it is important to learn about the culture, too.  The whole point of learning a language is to be able to communicate, and appreciating the cultures of the different Spanish-speaking countries allows for a much deeper level of connection and understanding.