Spanish
Westtown's Lower School begins Spanish language exposure in kindergarten. Students meet for Spanish twice a week for 20 minutes in kindergarten and twice weekly for 30 minutes from 1st through 5th grades. At all levels, students play games, hear and tell stories in Spanish, and become familiar with basic communicative routines, such as greetings, farewells, common requests, asking and answering questions about health, date, time, and weather. As they master sets of common vocabulary items they become comfortable with the practice of hearing and responding in another language.
Additionally, at every grade level, students are asked to transfer knowledge from other areas into Spanish. For example, when kindergarten hatches eggs in the spring, they learn language to discuss their new chicks in Spanish class; when 1st grade studies the rainforest, we classify animals in Spanish and read stories about Costa Rica and la selva tropical; in 3rd grade, students use math skills to tell time, calculate Celsius from Fahrenheit, figure out money exchanges, and follow a recipe for tortilla española! Lower School students also use Spanish as a vehicle for mastering new content in other areas, as with learning geographic or cultural facts. In the process, they become attuned to the distinctive sounds of Spanish and are encouraged to reproduce them in their own speech, both by implicit modeling and explicit guidance.
As they get more comfortable with the sounds of Spanish and with their own reading skills in English, students naturally begin to see sound-letter correspondences and gradually learn to read and spell in Spanish. In 4th grade they write guided essays about their real homes and their imaginary pioneer families and learn to type Spanish characters on the keyboard. By 5th grade, what may once have appeared as a random array of vowels and consonants becomes an intelligible paragraph in Spanish from which they can glean information and on which they can base simple conversations.
In addition to twice-weekly language classes, Westtown Lower School students also hear Spanish in other contexts. They learn Spanish songs in Gathering and in music classes and hear the language when other teachers incorporate Spanish words and expressions into their regular classroom routines. This type of collaborative language exposure allows students to become ever more accustomed to using Spanish as a way to learn rather than viewing the language as an object of instruction. Immersion in the Lower School sets the stage for later experiential learning of languages in the Middle and Upper Schools. Far from being rote translators from English to Spanish, Westtown students have the understanding and experience to grow into confident users of the language!
