Innovative Courses

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Permalink Reply by Greta Lundgaard on April 21, 2010 at 9:22am

We have a middle school Spanish Language AP program in 6 of our MS campuses. We target and identify 6th graders w/ Intermediate Mid proficiency in Reading & Writing Spanish and Intermediate High or above in Speaking. The students go through a 2 year looping program: 7th grade Spanish 3 Honors focuses of development of critical reading & writing skills, study skills, developing a college-going mind set (no specific textbook, primarily nonfiction current events text-types). 8th grade Spanish 4 AP embeds AP skills practice with more traditional short stories, still current events, intermediate literature, etc. Because the focus is on building literacy in the heritage language and transfer of skills into other courses and AP prep is the secondary priority, we are positively impacting completion rate and college going opportunities for these students. These students also tend to move into AVID as 9th graders, so the trajectory continues. This program does not meet the needs of all of our ESL/LEP students, but there is not one intervention that will, right?

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Permalink Reply by Thomas Sauer on April 23, 2010 at 11:41am

In Kentucky, all students have to take a course called "History and Appreciation of Visual and Performing Arts" as a graduation requirement. About five years ago, one of our schools developed a Spanish and French version of that course for 4th and 5th year language students. The curriculum is the same as the regular course, it's just taught in the language. Student can earn dual credit: one Carnegie unit for the Arts & Humanities course based on their grade in the class and one Carnegie unit for World Language on a proficiency exam. This has been an extremely popular class with students and the school now has to offer multiple sections.

We are currently exploring adding a Social Studies class in Spanish, perhaps on Global Issues and with a strong Service Learning component for the 2011/2012 school year. Would love to hear if anyone has tried something like that in their district or knows where to find resources.

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