¡Bienvenidos!
By building a solid foundation and early exposure to another language, OLG students, pre-k through 8th grade, are encouraged to become lifelong learners. Beginning with our youngest students, our Spanish class takes an exploratory approach. Students are exposed to the sounds of the language, basic vocabulary building blocks, and cultural practices and traditions.
Our preschoolers visit the Spanish classroom once a week, while our kindergarten through 5th grades visit twice a week. Once students reach middle school, Spanish becomes a daily core subject. They continue to grow in understanding the language and expressing their own messages to communicate real ideas. Students gain a novice level proficiency through vocabulary and grammar, listening, reading, writing, and artistic activities. They also learn about the countries where Spanish is spoken with complementary cultural lessons.
Instruction follows the guidelines set forth by the Standards for Foreign Language Learning to help students develop competencies in communication, culture, connections to other disciplines, comparisons between their primary language and Spanish, and communities outside the classroom. This level of learning in middle school means that many OLG students graduating 8th grade and planning to continue with Spanish in high school have a high success rate of bypassing Spanish 1, directly entering Spanish 2 in high school.