First grade Spanish students played detective this fall as they tried to figure out “¿Quién comió la empanada de mi abuela?” The game, to guess which family member ate Grandma’s empanada, was part of their Families unit, where students learn new vocabulary and incorporate it with familiar language structures to expand their conversational skills.

 

At Fay, language study starts in Kindergarten. Primary School students meet two or three times a week with World Languages teacher Erin Overstreet and spend the first half of the year focused on Spanish and the second half of the year on French. This gives students broad exposure to both languages before choosing a single language to pursue, French or Spanish, starting in third grade. 

Each class begins with a game or activity designed to transition students into listening and speaking in the language. This fall, first graders often started class with a Spanish-language dance, like the Salad Dance, following along to music and dance moves projected on the screen. Another favorite warm-up game involves rolling a six-sided dice with different questions to initiate listening and speaking in the target language. The die has simple questions on each side, like “How old are you?”, and preference questions, like whether you prefer playing or listening to music. “Starting class this way gives kids a sense of comfort,” says Erin. “When they know what to expect, they’re more willing to participate and try speaking the language.” 

Primary School focuses on the natural acquisition of language through games, stories, and creative projects. Fay’s Primary School World Languages program is based on the F.L.E.X (Foreign Language Experience) model, where students are exposed to functional chunks of language as well as cultural components that establish a broad foundation for later language studies. Through games, songs, and literature, students learn expressions and vocabulary while also developing an understanding of the cultures of the different Francophone and Hispanic countries around the world. 

For their Families unit, Erin introduced first graders to the vocabulary for each family member by creating a family tree with photos of her own family and their relationship to her.  After reading the class the book Pockets of Love by Yamile Saied Méndez, about the tradition of making empanadas in a family, Erin challenged students to find the empanada hidden behind different members of her family tree. Students took turns stepping out of the room while she hid the image of an empanada behind a different family member projected on the screen. When they returned, the students offered guesses about who had taken the empanada, using the correct vocabulary to identify each suspect. 

Erin speaks the target language for much of the class, so students repeatedly hear the language and typical sentence structures. As part of the Families unit, students listened to the Spanish-language book Federico y Sus Familias by Mili Hernández, about a cat who visits all the families in the neighborhood. Even if they don’t get every word, the practice of decoding language is beneficial. “They are recognizing common structures in the book, whether it’s the vocabulary and context or phrases,” says Erin. Primary students also become adept at recognizing cognates–Spanish words with the same roots as English words–and syntax patterns, such as that adjectives come after rather than before the noun in Spanish. “We’re giving students the tools to be observant learners of language,” says Erin. 

The Families unit also celebrates the differences between families, reinforcing social-emotional learning themes around accepting and respecting differences. The unit flows logically into talking about the Day of the Dead holiday in Mexico, which celebrates family members who have passed away. This year first graders made papel picado, a Mexican folk art tradition of creating festive banners out of colorful cutout squares of paper. 

One of the benefits of learning a language in elementary school is that younger students are generally less self-conscious about speaking another language and making mistakes. Erin teaches Primary School and Upper School French classes, so in her twelve years at Fay, she has seen the impact of the early introduction to language on her older students. “When I teach students in Upper School years later, I can tell they’re much more comfortable speaking, using context, using cognates, and constructing longer sentences.”