What if my child has never taken Spanish?
On occasion, students who have not had previous experience with Spanish join our middle school. In these cases, as with all courses at St. Mark's, students are met where they are. The focus is on ensuring that new students are learning and progressing at an acceptable and appropriate pace. Since 8th grade is the last half of Spanish I (which is a high school credit), new 8th graders should meet regularly with their teacher during extra help time to receive additional one-on-one support.
The 5th and 6th grade Spanish courses are a Pre-Spanish I program, which forms a bridge between the Lower School program and the Spanish I program of 7th and 8th grades. Therefore, these courses preview many of the linguistic elements and skills of Spanish I. In 5th and 6th grades, we focus on understanding spoken and written language since, in language learning, comprehension precedes production. The class is taught through storytelling in which grammatical and syntactical understanding comes to students through exposure to contextualized, comprehensible language input. This helps make students’ first years of middle school language instruction engaging and allows each student to work from their unique starting point in language acquisition. More advanced students can tell a story with greater detail and fluidity while less experienced students tell the story in its most basic form. Both are acceptable, since the primary goals of the class are developing creativity, learning to understand spoken language, and beginning to speak comprehensibly. Grammatical accuracy is acquired by students throughout the year. Students develop both active and passive language skills (listening, reading, speaking, and writing), focusing on narrating and describing in the present tense, asking and answering questions, using correct pronunciation, and demonstrating strong gist comprehension of teacher-produced speech and stories.