We made it to the next step!

I have had two curriculum meetings in the past two weeks with the foreign language team in my school district. We met last week just as a team of 4 to continue creating can-do statements and thematic webs for  each of 6 units in every grade. We've been stuck on this step for awhile - since the fall - and it's been a little frustrating. We come up with something we think is awesome and then we look at it the next meeting and hate it. So we change it. And then change it again. We spent a lot of time of elementary units, which made me feel a little bad for the middle school teachers. You can't know what to teach in middle school though if you don't know what you're teaching in elementary school so it was necessary to start from the youngest grade and work our way up. However last week, we finally got to middle school! And I must say, the middle school units look pretty awesome. There's one on communication, both face-to-face and with technology (ie learning how to text in Spanish :) ), and there's another one of love and relationships, and another one on how to communicate with medical professionals.... just to name a few. They all sound like so much fun to teach and will actually be useful to students if (hopefully when) they ever go abroad.

Yesterday was our second meeting and we finally finished all (well, most of) the overview of the units! We also had the smiling approval of our wonderful curriculum consultant, Helena Curtain. We finally made it to the next step in the curriculum process. At the end of yesterday, we wrote essential questions (EQ) for almost every grade; we just have grades 3-5 left. Our next meeting isn't until late May but at that meeting, we'll finish the EQs and then get a refresher course on how to write a UPI (unit plan inventory). After that, we need to go through the current Spanish 1 and 2 curriculum and make sure we hit all the grammar points in the new curriculum. Then, we can start writing assessments, creating lessons, and gathering materials! There's definitely still a lot to do, but we can see a light at the end of the tunnel now. It's been a long, slow process but is totally worth it. Even the small changes we are currently making in our classrooms are showing such a difference in how our students can communicate orally. They have so much more confidence now than at the beginning of the year and it makes me so proud to me my students succeeding in the ways that they are.