Specialty Highlight January 2025: Spanish
First through Third Grade
Our year in Spanish is going very well. First through Third, continue learning vocabulary through songs. They’ll learn a song one year and then come back to it and add more verses the next. We practice vocabulary by playing games and then using the new words to answer simple questions. We’ve learned about food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, as well as fall, winter, and the body. In the next few weeks, we will be learning about days of the week and months of the year, among other topics.
This year, to celebrate the holidays, the students sang a Venezuelan villancico Cantemos, cantemos. As a child, I sang this song with family and friends. We would go caroling in our neighborhood. I was delighted to share a memory from my childhood with the students of The Garden School.
To learn about Hispanic culture, First Grade sang popular children songs like a la rueda rueda and la vaca lechera, and learned a hand clap game: al salir de la cueva. Second and Third Grade learned the fable of Pedro y el lobo, and sana sana colita de rana. We celebrated día de los muertos and tasted pan de muertos.
Fourth and Fifth Grade
In Fourth and Fifth Grade, we continue taking dictation. This year, we are learning about culture through legends and stories from different indigenous groups from South and Central America. Our first legend was La totuma mágica from the Venezuelan indigenous group los pemones. We wrote it and rewrote it on our big books with illustrations. We practiced retelling the story and became familiar with the vocabulary. To finish with the legend, we took turns reading it individually and later as a group, practicing the correct pronunciation. Recently, we began studying the story of el tigre y el rayo. We identified nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles in the stories and legends. We began learning to conjugate regular verbs in the present tense that end in AR, ER, and IR. We are learning new vocabulary for the winter unit including clothing, weather, etc. We are having fun practicing tongue twisters. We celebrated día de los muertos and tasted pan de muertos.
Sixth and Seventh Grade
Sixth and Seventh Grade is spending time learning songs and legends from South and Central America. We are currently working on the El Dorado legend from ”La Conquista” (colonization) in Colombia. Previously, we explored another legend from Venezuela: La totuma mágica. This legend talks about the origins of the tallest waterfall in the world, Angel Falls or Cherún Merún in the Pemon language. Also, we are learning the song La Cucaracha from México. This song was written during México’s 1910-1920 civil war (”La Revolución”) and is closely related to Pancho Villa. We continue conjugating regular and irregular verbs in present, past, and future and writing short sentences about ourselves and others.
We celebrated día de los muertos and tasted pan de muertos.
