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"Education is a journey
not a destination" |
State College Friends School
1900 University Drive State College, PA 16801 814-237-8386
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Middle School Academic Curriculum |
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Math (Teachers Bailey, Bobbie & Todd) 6th Grade (Teacher Bailey)
The middle school Spanish program is a transition between the more informal elementary curriculum and high school language classes. In the sixth and seventh grades, reading and writing are introduced more extensively and by the end of the eighth grade, students continuing to study Spanish should be able to enter Spanish II. Current language teaching research confirms that comprehensive input through listening and reading is the most important factor in learning a second language. Our middle school language program respects that priority while also asking students to speak and write in Spanish. Content continues to drive our curriculum. Our sixth grade class focuses on the idea of being virtual tourists. We begin with learning how to read menus and order food by using authentic menus from Spanish and Latin American restaurants and learning to cook and serve a typical Chilean lunch to the seventh and eighth grades. We continue our journey as tourists by practicing how to give and ask directions, take public transportation, visit important places in cities and choose and check into hotels. We use Cuzco, Peru, as our destination for most of these activities because it’s a small city visited every year by the many thousands of tourists who visit Machu Picchu every year. This means that realia in the form of city maps, train schedules, and description of museums, shops and hotels are easily available on the internet in Spanish. In the seventh and eighth grades, our touring of Latin America is focused on culture. We select a few countries each year and look at their geography, history and art, choosing countries with rich cultural and literary traditions like Spain, Mexico or Peru. We also examine the lives of Spanish speaking people in the United States. Though our emphasis continues to be on understanding and fluency over formal grammatical instruction, we also work with basic grammatical concepts in Spanish. The overall goals of our Spanish program are social as well as linguistic. We center our study thematically not only because students are more engaged when their learning is driven by content rather than the acquisition of specific skills, but also because the ability to understand and interact with other cultures is fundamental to giving meaning to language learning. |
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