Spanish Program
Hola, me llamo Karina. I grew up in Guatemala. I have been teaching Spanish at Giddens School since 1998. I want to tell you that I enjoy teaching my language and sharing my own culture with the children at Giddens.
Children are very interested to learn about other cultures and how you can communicate in other languages. At Giddens School, we want to give the children the opportunity to study, learn and value other cultures and traditions. We also want students to understand that people around the world have the same basic human needs although they may meet those needs in different ways.
As a teacher, I always try to find different ways to teach in order to reach every student using a variety of approaches, methods, materials and strategies. I like to use songs, books and personal stories from my childhood in my class to share an authentic perspective on different cultures. I teach traditional songs as well as popular English songs in Spanish. I also like to teach traditional and popular games from Latin America. We start conversationally with basic vocabulary and grow to being able to create more complex sentences. As the students get older, we learn basic grammar, including reading and writing in Spanish.
Our Spanish program begins in Preschool with sessions twice a week for thirty minutes per session, and continues all the way through fifth grade where I meet with students twice a week for forty minutes per session.