Grades 7-8 Spanish

  • Summary of Subject Content

    The St. Bernadette School’s Spanish World Language Program aligns its standards for learning and language acquisition with the national standards set forth by the American Council of the Teaching of Foreign Languages. The curriculum at St. Bernadette School implements four components in order to ensure in-depth comprehension of the Spanish language: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. By the end of eighth grade, students who graduate from St. Bernadette School will be able to identify people and objects in their environment or from other school subjects, based on oral and written description. They will also be able to demonstrate comprehension of principal messages contained in various media such as illustrated texts, posters or advertisements, in familiar contexts and with text features that support meaning visually or graphically. Additionally, students will be able to recognize that cognates and previously learned structures enhance comprehension of spoken and written language. Finally, students will be able to identify and appreciate differences in cultural perspectives in a broader range of topics and begin to appreciate such differences in topic areas presented in the curriculum.

    As students begin learning new vocabulary and grammatical concepts, words are introduced visually and in context through reading and language input. New vocabulary is practiced through short, engaging reading and dialogue. Learning continues with concentrated practice where students complete activities focused on reading comprehension, listening, and basic writing skills. Through these activities, grammar is also integrated with communication and includes clear explanations and examples. In order to demonstrate mastery of new concepts, students complete performance based speaking, writing, and listening tasks which reflect real-life scenarios. These tasks are supported by strategies and step-by-step processes that enable all students to be successful in their acquisition of the Spanish language. By the end of the Spanish program, students will have become better writers, readers, and speakers of the target language. 

  • Grade 7

    Topics covered in seventh grade include: greetings, introductions, numbers, time, body parts, classroom, calendar date, asking for help, weather, seasons, activities and expressions for saying what you like and dislike, adjectives and vocabulary to ask about and describe someone’s personality, classroom items and furniture, parts of the classroom, prepositions of location, foods, beverages, adverbs of frequency, expressions to show surprise, expressions to discuss health, preferences, agreement, disagreement, and quantity, adjectives to describe food, leisure activities, places, expressions to tell where and with whom you go, expressions to talk about when things are done, feelings, expressions for extending, accepting, and declining invitations, and expressions to tell when something happens. The grammatical concepts include: infinitives, making negative statements, definite and indefinite articles, word order, subject pronouns, the present tense, plurals, interrogative words, and how to say what someone is going to do.

  • Grade 8

    The topics covered in eighth grade include: family and parties, bedroom items, rooms in a house and household chores, electronic equipment, computers, communication, and computer-related items, colors, adjectives to describe things, describing people and ordering a meal, clothing, shopping, places to shop, gifts, and accessories, numbers 100 – 1,000, vacation places, activities, modes of transportation, recycling and volunteer work, places in a community, television shows, movie genres, and giving opinions. The grammatical concepts include: interrogative words, possessive adjectives, comparisons and superlatives, stem-changing verbs, demonstrative adjectives, the preterit, affirmative commands, the present progressive tense, and direct and indirect object pronouns.

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