Spanish

By the time students graduate from The Philadelphia School they are expected to have a basic degree of proficiency in four areas: listening comprehension and speaking, reading and writing, knowledge of basic Spanish grammar, and knowledge of the history and culture of the language.

In the Middle School, Spanish is taught four times a week as a full academic subject. Students are grouped heterogeneously by proficiency and homogeneously by grade. Depending on the size of the grade, there are two or three sections of 11 to 15 students. During the three years of the Middle School these groups rotate among the three Spanish teachers, giving the students exposure to three different Spanish accents - Argentinean, Chilean, and Cuban. If there are several students for whom Spanish is their native language, they are placed, schedule permitting, in a separate, more advanced class.

To celebrate the culmination of ten years of learning Spanish at The Philadelphia School, the eighth grade visits a Spanish-speaking country to put their facility with the language to good use. In years past, they have traveled to Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, and Spain in a cycle that corresponded with their thematic studies.

In February 2010, our students will travel to a new destination, Puerto Rico, as a first step in designing a close curricular relationship with a school there. Our goal in the next several years is to develop a program in partnership with a school in Puerto Rico. Our hope is that this learning is collaborative and reciprocal, with our students traveling to Puerto Rico and our partner school’s students visiting Philadelphia in service of jointly created projects.