This week, our 4th grade classes learned all 12 subject pronouns in Spanish. This requires a little out of the box thinking, because the subject pronouns in Spanish are different from English. For example, we do not have a subject pronoun for "it", but we have FIVE different subject pronouns for "you", and they are not interchangeable!
My college students frequently ask at the beginning of the course if we are going to cover the vosotros forms. Most Spanish-speaking countries use the word "ustedes" for the plural you. In Spain, however, they use "ustedes" for the formal plural you, and "vosotros" and "vosotras" for the informal plural you. There are many schools that don't bother to teach those forms, but if the students go on to study in Spain, or to read literature that was published in Spain, or to take higher level courses, they need to be familiar with them. My college students are usually a bit surprised to hear that even our elementary students learn these forms.
At All Saints, we work to establish a strong foundation. Both our faculty and our families are very mindful about what we want to build in our children, academically, socially, spiritually and physically. It only makes sense to start off with a solid base of knowledge, so that when we add material on top of that, we won't find big gaps that fall through.
These are our twelve subject pronouns:
yo = I
tú = you (singular, informal)
Ud. (usted) = you (singular, formal)
él = he (Side note: I loved that our kids immediately understood that the accent mark was to keep it from being confused with the definite article!)
ella = she
nosotros = we (all boys, or both boys and girls)
nosotras = we (all girls)
vosotros = you all (boys or both boys and girls, informal, used in Spain)
vosotras = you all (all girls, informal, used in Spain)
Uds. (ustedes) = you all (everywhere, formal in Spain)
ellos = they (all boys or both boys and girls)
ellas = they (all girls)
Soon we will be adding in regular -ar/-er/-ir verbs in the present tense, and also some of the irregular verbs like ser, estar, tener and ir.
