Spanish

About this course

The language taught here is Spanish, and the course calls itself Year 2, picking up where the previous grade left off. The grammar is the heart of it. Your student works through the preterite for all three verb families and its irregulars, then the imperfect, then the hardest single skill in beginning Spanish, choosing between them, with signal words such as ayer and de repente on one side and siempre, cada dia, and de nino on the other. From there come direct object pronouns, indirect object pronouns, the two used together, reflexive verbs, comparatives and superlatives, and the difference between por and para. Vocabulary moves well past household nouns into technology, health, emotions, civics and government, academic words for analysis and argument, advanced descriptive adjectives, and a full lesson of idioms such as costar un ojo de la cara and ponerse las pilas. The conversation units cover opinions, agreeing and disagreeing politely, telling a past-tense story, telephone calls, discussing the news, and talking about faith.

The reading unit is where this year separates itself from earlier grades: your student reads from the Reina-Valera 1960 Spanish Bible, a Spanish news article, Latin American folktales, a passage of Gabriel Garcia Marquez with questions that ask directly whether anything in it conflicts with a Christian worldview, Spanish poetry, song lyrics, a recipe, a formal letter, a Spanish Wikipedia article, and a written testimony. Writing follows the same arc, from a personal testimony and a formal letter to a Spanish-speaking church, through a narrative essay and a research summary, to editing and revising a draft. The culture unit is candid, covering Spanish colonialism honestly, indigenous cultures before it, the Catholic Church's five centuries of dominance, the recent growth of evangelical Christianity, futbol, and the quinceanera. Two lessons look at the Old Colony Mennonite settlements in Chihuahua, Durango, Campeche, Paraguay's Chaco, and Bolivia, and ask your student to reflect on what it means to live as a separate people.

There are 108 lessons in 9 units of 12, at about 30 minutes each. Units 7 through 9 cover the same ground as units 1 through 3 with newly written lessons, so the second half of the year is largely a second pass. A lesson is a short essay, a set of exercises, and a Scripture connection, followed by a ten-question quiz that grades itself. Two practical notes. There is no audio, so pronunciation and the telephone and roleplay conversations depend entirely on you and your family reading the Spanish aloud together. And roughly a dozen lessons send your student to material the course does not supply, including a Spanish Bible for the reading assignments, a Spanish-English dictionary, and named websites for the Mennonite research lessons, so plan on supervised internet access and a Reina-Valera Bible before starting unit 5.

What the course covers

• The preterite tense, regular and irregular, for narrating past events
• The imperfect tense and choosing correctly between preterite and imperfect
• Direct, indirect, and double object pronouns
• Reflexive verbs, comparatives, superlatives, and por versus para
• Vocabulary for technology, health, civics, academics, and emotions
• Spanish idioms and advanced descriptive adjectives
• Conversations about opinions, disagreement, health, news, and faith
• Reading the Reina-Valera Bible, news, folktales, poetry, and Garcia Marquez
• Writing a testimony, a formal letter, a narrative essay, and a research summary
• Culture: colonialism, indigenous peoples, Latin American Christianity, and Anabaptist settlements

What your student will be able to do

• Narrate a past event in Spanish using preterite and imperfect correctly
• Replace nouns with direct and indirect object pronouns in the right order
• Explain and apply the difference between por and para
• Read a page of unsimplified Spanish and summarize what it says
• Write a testimony, formal letter, or narrative essay in Spanish and revise it
• Hold a conversation that states an opinion and disagrees politely

Scope and sequence

All 9 units of Spanish for Grade 7, in the order they are taught.

Every lesson, by title

All 108 lesson titles are listed here — nothing is withheld until you download. Open a unit to read its contents.

One whole lesson, exactly as it comes

This is a real lesson taken from the middle of the course — the teaching text, the practice, the homework, and the first three quiz questions with their answers. It is not a marketing excerpt.

What you will need

Drawn from the materials named across all 108 lessons of this course. Most families already own most of it.