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Spanish classes at Meridian Academy teach students the language, culture, and geography of the Spanish speaking world. Students develop as language learners focusing on five main themes: communication, culture, communities, connections and comparisons. A varied curriculum with differentiated instruction insures that all students are challenged. Because all Meridian students study Spanish, the language provides a common foundation that permeates the life of the school. Spanish is a significant language in Boston, the United States, and throughout the world and its study provides students with the opportunity to involve themselves in these many different communities during their secondary school years and beyond.
Our program has the following objectives:
- Students develop competency with oral communication. Spanish is the primary language during class and students actively speak and hear it in order to develop a comfort and proficiency with conversation in Spanish.
- The study of culture and language structure proceeds hand-in-hand through activities and projects that involve both (e.g., dubbing a movie scene, planning a travel guide, communicating with a native-speaker for a community service project).
- Just as first languages are learned orally well before written forms are introduced, students undertake more formal work on grammar and writing once oral progress indicates a readiness for that stage.
Spanish 1
An introductory level class aimed at teaching students both the geography and language of the Spanish speaking population. Through a variety of modalities students are invited to learn all aspects of language learning utilizing five main themes: communication, culture, connections, comparisons and communities. This class introduces students to vocabulary themes and has them use their growing vocabulary to demonstrate their comprehension by communicating basic needs through conversations, skits, and oral presentations. Students learn to recognize and conjugate regular and irregular verbs. Students explore written Spanish pieces and provide written and oral responses. Throughout the course, students gain a deep appreciation for the language and respect for the diverse community that surrounds us.
Spanish 1.5
This course is a continuation of Spanish 1 for Division 1 and 2 students. Students expand their repertoire of vocabulary, recognize and conjugate verbs and their irregularities in a variety of tenses, and work with more complex sentence structures. The works that students read and write grow in complexity. Students are immersed in the arts studying works by Picasso and Dalí.
Spanish 2
Level II students demonstrate their increasing linguistic sophistication through conversation and performance. They are able to recognize and conjugate verbs and their irregular forms in a variety of tenses in addition to being able identify when and how to use them correctly. Students examine various works of literature including a piece by Cervantes: Don Quijote (a reader). They produce well defined papers, demonstrating their understanding of vocabulary and themes as well as their grasp of the mechanics, usage, and grammar of the Spanish language.
Spanish 3
Spanish 3 students begin the year with a review of the preterit and imperfect tenses. They further their understanding of grammar through study of the conditional, past perfect, and present subjunctive tenses. The class explores thematic units on topics such as entertainment, fine arts, and communication and examines the history, politics, and social issues of a variety of Spanish-speaking countries through short stories, film, and current events periodicals.
Spanish 4
Spanish 4 students extend their ability to speak and write sophisticated concepts and to read Spanish literature while taking their skills into the community. Students build upon grammatical concepts they learned in the past with a focus on the imperfect subjunctive, future ,and conditional perfect as well as both the present and past perfect forms of the subjunctive. They explore literary works by authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Borges to better understand their own world and to gain insight into the lives of other people. With their monthly community service visits to La Alianza Hispana, a non-profit organization serving the Latino community in Boston, they are able to directly apply their learning outside of the classroom as they work with senior citizens.