One thing that is really cool (and stressful and overwhelming) at my school right now is a redesign of the entire K-8 Spanish curriculum. I was hired last summer and am fortunate enough to have been a part of the redesign from the beginning. We worked about 6 days total in the summer and have met once a month since school started. "We" means me, the teacher for whom I'm subbing, the K-2 Spanish teacher, the K-2 Spanish long-term sub, the 6th/7th grade teacher, and the 8th grade teacher. Every now and then our curriculum director will drop by the meetings for an update. She is just an interim this year but is fantastic and very supportive. Also, we have been working with a wonderful consultant by the name of Helena Curtain. She is so passionate about her work and her beliefs. Her energy is contagious and we've been working very hard to create a new curriculum that will make not only her, but also ourselves, our curriculum director, and our community, proud. The work that we are doing is a lot like the unit plan projects that I had to do in my undergrad education at U of M. However this time, someone will actually be teaching/learning the final products! This certainly makes it much more nerve-racking than when I was just working for a grade (although that grade was basically on what my entire methods class was based). Here's a quick shout-out to my professor... thanks for having us do all that work! Those skills are definitely paying off in the real world, as I'm sure you knew it would :)
To bring you up to speed on our process of redesign, we started by learning all about the art of communicative language and speaking in the target language. Helena gave us multiple mini lessons in German (which none of us speak) to put us back in the shoes of a novice language learner with a teacher that speaks 90% or more of class time in the target language. To get a better idea about what we learned and discussed, click on this link.
During our meetings this year, our goal is to move the entire Spanish 1 curriculum into grades K-5. Obviously, grammar cannot be the focus here because much of the grammar is not developmentally appropriate. So essentially, we are focusing on the topics of vocabulary and transferring those into new thematic units. We are also teaching different phrases of grammar that connect to the thematic units so that the students will learn to speak in different ways. By doing this, we aren't explicitly teaching the grammar behind why they speak a certain way, but the students still get the practice of speaking in full sentences. We started by creating thematic webs (about 4 for each grade) and then developed "I can..." statements as the detailed objectives of what we want our students to be able to do by the end of the unit. The step on which we are currently is going back and matching the thematic webs to the "I can" statements. This process is taking a long time as we improve each thematic unit. We've added more units so that we now have about six different, 6-week units per grade. We've spent most of our time so far on grades K-3 which is slightly frustrating because we cannot seem to progress to any upper grades! However, it is impossible to plan for the higher grades when you have not yet planned the younger grades. And actually, our thematic units for the primary grades are looking really awesome. We're meeting again in March, so I'll give an update then as to how far we've come.
I'm sad that I'm only at this school one year (remember, maternity leave = long term sub) because I would love to teach all of these units. I am very proud of all of the work we have done so far. I am really enjoying redesigning curriculum and it's even made me think about getting my masters in curriculum instruction. However, I think my heart is still set on bilingual education (that's a whole other post).
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