Friday, January 19, 2018

Grade K-5 Spanish Teacher Señorita Emilia Hobkirk

Hola amigos y familias de GUS,
Hello GUS friends and families,

Students in the lower school are making substantial progress this year in la clase de español! From kindergarten through fifth grade, students are learning words and phrases to express themselves in Spanish. Each grade learns their curriculum at a different pace and with a distinct approach, based on each group’s developmental stage and academic goals.

Kindergarteners recently embarked on a study of weather. We’re learning short weather phrases, a weather song, and how to use pictures and gestures to understand simple questions about the weather. Students have become experts in weather words and led their classmates in vocabulary practice! We are exploring vocabulary for clothing as well. Soon we’ll start making connections between weather and clothing, eventually composing sentences about what we wear in different weather.

First, second, and third graders are finishing up their units on family in January. First and second graders have learned vocabulary for family members and how to create a sentence, with varying levels of support, about who they live with (including pets, of course!). They have written, drawn, and presented their sentences. Third graders took their family study a step further. They learned to describe their family members’ likes and dislikes, personality, and appearance. They are working on short books about their families, each page describing one family member. Their books will be typed, illustrated, and published in February!

Fourth and fifth graders are studying “daily vocabulary,” including the months of the year, days of the week, holidays, and weather. They are using the vocabulary we’ve reviewed, along with simple sentence modeling, to compose a variety of full sentences. With support, students can now use known vocabulary and new words to synthesize sentences about the date, the weather, how they’re feeling, and what they’re going to do on a given day. Soon, we’ll start learning ordinal words (first, next, after, then, etc.) to connect these ideas and express longer connected thoughts!

As the lower school Spanish teacher, I couldn't be more proud of these incredible students and the substantial progress they are making. This is my second year at GUS, and I was very interested to know how the students’ language retention would be when we began this year. I was really pleased to discover that they retained much of their vocabulary and language skills—even though that meant I had to update my curriculum to meet their more advanced abilities! Students wow me every day with their enthusiasm, hard work, and natural curiosity. I feel privileged to work with such a wonderful group of language learners.

Read more about the experiential GUS lower school curriculum and learn about our pre-K Spanish program.