Spanish

Spanish is for everyone...at Incarnation School.  All our students, Kindergarten through Grade 8, have Spanish classes in the Spanish room with Señora Gordon.

Kindergarteners and first graders have one 30-minute class each week.  They learn basic Spanish vocabulary – greetings, names, numbers, colors, days and months, foods and clothing, etc. – through conversation, repetition, songs, games, projects.  Each student has a folder for paper work (coloring activities primarily) they do in connection with vocabulary study; these papers are sent home at the end of each quarter.

Second and third graders go to Spanish class twice a week for 20 minutes.  They continue to learn new vocabulary and phrases and use the Level A workbook of the ¡Viva el español! series.  This workbook is sent home with the students at the end of third grade. At this stage the students enjoy using and acting out the words and phrases they know.

Students in fourth and fifth have 30 minutes of Spanish twice a week; they use the Level B and Level C, respectively, of the ¡Viva el español! series.  Each group reviews vocabulary learned in the lower levels and becomes more responsible for remembering what has been studied.  These students are now able to create and perform dialogs for the class using the expressions they have learned. They take periodic tests on the words mastered.

For middle-school students their Spanish class becomes a more academic subject, meeting four times a week for 40 minutes each.  One day of the week their class is a split class, with half going to Language Arts and half to Spanish and then switching; this allows a better environment for additional oral practice.  Students are now responsible for not only listening to and speaking the language, but also for reading and writing it correctly.  They use the levels A and B of the Holt, Rinehart, Winston series ¡Ven conmigo! – Adelante and En camino which includes workbooks used in class, tapes and videos for supplementary comprehension and practice as well as CD –ROMS used in the computer lab.  .  A special activity done each year is the Power Point project done in conjunction with their computer class.  Students are graded on oral work, notebooks, projects and activities, quizzes, tests, and class participation and preparation

Every other year there is a special occasion at Incarnation appropriately called FIESTA.  This is a whole-day event including Spanish dress and food, a bilingual mass, performances of music, dance, and drama by all grades, displays of projects, raffle prizes, and professional performers.