Spanish at Westtown’s Lower School is an experience, not a subject! Children begin to hear and understand the language in the Primary class, taking advantage of the active language learning center of a child’s brain. Classes meet twice a week for 30 minutes in Primary and 1st grades, and for 40 minutes in 2nd through 5th grades.
Learn Spanish Like a Child!
Westtown Lower School students acquire Spanish the way they acquired their first language. Their job is to look, listen, and understand. The teacher’s job is to make it easy for them to understand. We do this by focusing on a few structures in Spanish each week, supported by gestures, facial expressions, visual cues in the classroom, acting, and telling stories. Research shows that we learn language best when we are provided with comprehensible input, so we use familiar Spanish and gradually add new structures with lots of clues and visual context and plenty of repetition.
We borrow a lot of techniques from TPRS—Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling—and other Comprehensible Input (CI) strategies. TPRS and CI work on the theory that students learn most when they enjoy and understand what they hear. To keep them listening, we involve them in making the stories fun, with lots of personal input and unexpected details. As students add to the stories in Spanish, they hear, understand, use, and acquire the language, even though their attention is focused on the story rather than the Spanish.
Every Lower School Spanish class takes part in a gardening project in the spring, when we plant many foods that are integral to Spanish and Latin-American cooking. The following fall, each class harvests its crop and prepares and shares food from the garden throughout the year. The process is discussed first in class, using storytelling techniques to provide all the necessary Spanish words and structures. Next, the class carries out the steps in the garden or kitchen, using as much of the target language as possible. Back in the classroom, we retell the experience in Spanish and write, illustrate, read, or act out the story.