Courses · Spanish · Grades 3 to 8
Spanish
The most spoken daughter of Latin, the language of about five hundred million neighbors, taught the old way: stories first, then saying it out loud, then making things with your hands. Each short course is built around real people and places, the Roman aqueduct still standing at Segovia, Velázquez’s waterseller, Don Quixote charging the windmills, the brave scholars who printed the first Spanish Bible, and teaches the grammar those stories open up. A student who has met our Latin courses will keep finding old friends here, because Spanish is Latin that never stopped being spoken.
Choose a grade
Ages 8–9
Grade 3
Spanish is near: hello and goodbye, the magic words, counting to ten, the colors, the family at the table, animal friends, and a first hymn sung in Spanish, Cristo me ama.
Ages 9–10
Grade 4
Words in action: the house and the school, days and months, weather and seasons, little sentences with hay, me gusta and tengo, and the Padre Nuestro prayed by heart.
Ages 10–11
Grade 5
Saying real things: el and la, one and many, the present tense of -ar verbs, the verb to be, adjectives that agree and polite questions, with the aqueduct of Segovia, Velázquez, Don Quixote and the Bear Bible.
Ages 11–12
Grade 6
The sentence grows: -er and -ir verbs, ser and estar side by side, tener and my-and-your, telling time, with El Cid, Teresa of Ávila and Las Meninas, and a whole story read on a California rancho.
Ages 12–13
Grade 7
Past and future: yesterday’s endings, tomorrow with ir + a, the little pronouns and gustar, with Columbus, Magellan and the Camino de Santiago, and Samaniego’s real fables read in Spanish.
Ages 13–14
Grade 8
Bridge to real Spanish: the strong irregular past, commands in the kitchen, real letters and conversation, the true opening of Don Quixote, and Psalm 23 in the Reina-Valera.
How every lesson works
Each course is a short course: 5 units of 2 lessons, one lesson a week, about one quarter of the school year. Each week has three sessions of 30–40 minutes: one to learn, one to make, one to practice and speak. Grammar spirals grade by grade, the way the old books did it: each year repeats the patterns out loud and adds one or two new structures.
- Warm-up. A few minutes of saying Spanish out loud: the five vowels, the week’s phrases, the verb columns, with a puzzle to think about.
- Watch. A hand-picked YouTube video from a trusted teaching channel, with a note on when to watch it.
- Learn. The story, how Spanish works, and say it out loud, in short sections a parent can read aloud. Latin American pronunciation throughout, with Spain’s differences noted.
- Picture study. A painting, page, map or place, Goya’s children at play, Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Doré’s Don Quixote, the Bear Bible’s title page, the Alhambra’s lions, to look at closely and talk about.
- Activity. The student makes something every week: sound cards, a color book, a family calendar, a verb wheel, house labels, a day-clock, a family-history page, a recipe cooked by commands.
- Spanish notebook and flashcards. A notebook of dated charts and sentences, and a flashcard deck that grows every lesson and is drilled every session.
- Worked examples and practice. Translation drills in both directions, Spanish to English and English to Spanish, with answers to check, easy through challenge.
Each unit ends with a short review and a unit challenge, such as a cognate tree poster or labeling the whole house in Spanish, and every quarter ends with a family evening: a little concert in Grade 3, the Padre Nuestro prayed together in Grade 4, a fiesta in Grade 5, a story afternoon in Grade 6, a fable night in Grade 7, and in Grade 8 a capstone velada with Psalm 23 and a page of Cervantes.
Nothing needs to be bought. Activities use index cards, paper, pencil, crayons and things from around the house. Each unit also lists optional books and free resources.
Every course can also be downloaded as one printable PDF, with the video links printed in each lesson.
Spanish and Latin are built to help each other here: Spanish is the Latin of the roads still being spoken, and the courses point out the family resemblance, agua and aqua, estrella and stella, every time it opens a door. A student may take either language first, or both at once.
Videos open on YouTube. Each one was checked for the lesson and for the content, but YouTube shows its own recommendations and ads around them, so parents should stay nearby.