Essentials
- Research indicates the number of students who speak Spanish at home continues to grow in states such as California, Texas, Florida, and others.
- This plan proposes a supplementary reading program for grades K-2 that contains original Spanish language stories, not translations or adaptations.
- The program includes activities and strategies that teach, reteach, review, reinforce, and enrich reading practices in Spanish language arts or dual language programs.
- The program is aligned to the Spanish Common Core State Standards and includes an easy-to-follow Teacher Resource manual as well as a Reading Inventory component to measure growth.
Goals
Research indicates that students who speak Spanish at home may feel inferior to their English-speaking peers and attempt to hide or forget their heritage language. With this in mind, the main goal of this program is twofold:
- Students will develop literacy in Spanish, and
- Students will become bilingual, bicultural, and take pride in their cultural heritage.
Organization
- This program is designed for grades K-2 and aims to supplement and strengthen any core Spanish language program being used.
- It is divided into eight themes, each of which contains four stories.
- Each story covers five days of lessons about the same story, addressing standards related to comprehension, vocabulary, structures, and connecting to content areas such as social studies and science.
Intended Distribution
To schools that adopt supplementary or enrichment programs for their Spanish language arts or dual language programs. This program will serve the needs of
- students who speak Spanish as a heritage language,
- newly-arrived students who are native Spanish speakers, and
- native English speakers enrolled in a dual language program.