How to Teach Spanish in Summer School
Some students use summer school Spanish courses as an opportunity to take a second shot at this challenging subject, whereas others enroll in this course to get ahead. When teaching summer school Spanish, you often must deal with not only an abbreviated class term but also a variance in learners' levels. To ensure that your summer school term is an informative and educational one, you must not just follow the standard school year course of study but instead, you must make some modification.
Instructions
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Assess students at the start of the summer. Give all students a diagnostic test at the beginning of the summer term; ask them to match up vocabulary and complete basic sentence composition. Study these assessments to determine each student's starting level.
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Differentiate instruction, if necessary. If your study of these diagnostic results shows that you have many different levels of students, divide your students into groups according to ability levels; give each group slightly different activities to ensure that they are neither too challenged nor are they insufficiently challenged.
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Divide the number of words students must learn by the number of weeks in your program. Because vocabulary learning is of paramount importance when it comes to language acquisition, it is important that students learn the same number of words as they would, had they taken the course during the school year. To ensure this, divide the words you would teach in a traditional school year to fit the summer school term. For example, if you would normally teach 200 words during the year, and your summer term is 4 weeks long, students would need to follow a blistering pace of learning 50 new words a week.
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Create vocabulary assessments. Craft weekly quizzes featuring the words you will teach to judge student mastery levels.
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Select a different focus for each week. Again, aim to include all of the topics you would include in a standard school year, planning your time schedule before starting the term to ensure that you do not fall behind. For example, in 1 week, you may deal with verb conjugation rules, whereas in another week, you would deal with the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns and adjectives.
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