» How many lessons are in the Level One Teacher's Manual?
Answer:
The Teacher's Manual has 15 chapters. Each chapter has between 9 and 12 lessons segments. The lesson segments include Songs, Calendar, Questions, Numbers, Alphabet, Games, Verbs, Money, Opposites, Zoo, Activities and a Closing. Most lesson segments can be repeated once or twice during the course of a given chapter.
If you follow our 20-30 minute schedule, you will teach 160 days worth of lessons to complete Level One. If you follow the 45 to 60 minute schedule, it will take you 80 days to complete the program and you will have less repetition of lessons.
» Do you plan a level two and when would that be available?
Answer:
Level two is written. Our goal is to finalize the development of Level 2 by January of 2011. Level 2 will have a more thematic approach and an emphasis on literacy (reading and writing in Spanish.)
» Does the program includes assessments or methods to test the students' knowledge?
Answer:
The classroom version does include an assessment book. The program includes 15 chapters and there is an assessment to be given at the conclusion of every 3 chapters. There is also an oral assessment guide and rubric so that you can give oral assessments at any time and track progress of individual students knowledge throughout the program at your convenience. Furthermore, the assessments are leveled with a version for non-readers and a version for readers. This allows you to assess younger students’ knowledge without requiring them to read or write in Spanish. The goal of the program is to develop listening and comprehension skills. The majority of assessments evaluate those skills. The oral assessment rubric allows you to evaluate a student's comfort with language production and note the student's ability to produce Spanish words or phrases in response to images with many topics you've presented in the program. In general for language learning at the elementary level, you want to grade comfort and participation. If students are responding to your instructions you can verify that they are acquiring the language.
» Can you give me a general idea of topics covered during the program?
Answer:
The goal of the program is to develop receptive language skills and allow students to begin producing in Spanish in response to questions. They will cover the first 15 letters of the alphabet, learn their numbers through 50, with the goal that they really know the number names, not just how to count in sequence.
You will teach simple verb constructions and practice creating phrases using poder, necesitar, querer and gustar (to be able, to need, to want and to like). You will expose students to a range of action verbs taken from the Verbos flash cards. You will study colors, practice counting coins in Spanish and learn many calendar concepts. Students will begin to learn opposites towards the end of Level One. Parts of the body are introduced, as well as a number of basic question formats.
» What types of activities are in the Calico Spanish Student Activity Pack?
Answer:
The activity pack is primarily a set of worksheets with the song lyrics so that students can create their own song books. There are 30 songs on the Mi guitarrí music CD and every song has an individual page in the activity pack. In addition, there is an activity for farm animals (color and cut), parts of the body (cut and paste), and an activity to create signs for use in a Red Light, Green Light game.
» Does your program include a workbook? Can I make students copies of resources?
Answer:
Our program is not workbook based; however, there are opportunities for students to do independent work. The Student Activity book includes reproducibles of the various pre-planned printed activities. With your purchase of the classroom version, you will also receive these items and the reproducible assessment sheets on a CD-Rom in a .pdf format so that you can make copies as needed. Some of the student activities are song lyric sheets designed to allow students to create their own songbooks for use when singing. The creation of the songbooks gives students an opportunity to express themselves creatively and also provides a key literacy building activity. Students begin to practice reading in Spanish simply by following along with the lyric sheets during the music portion of the lesson. In addition, Calico Spanish includes numerous opportunities for students to do independent work that are not worksheet based. For example, students will create their own books about colors.
» What is the methodology for Calico Spanish?
Answer:
Calico Spanish is based on the Natural Approach as described by Tracy Terrell and Stephen Krashen (1983) in their research on language acquisition.
The key concept in the Natural Approach is that students learn language only when they are exposed to messages in that language which they can decipher and understand. Calico Spanish is designed to use visual aids, activities, songs and mini-dramatizations to equip you to present lessons to your students so that they can understand the basic concepts you are attempting to communicate. You will regularly use Spanish words the students haven’t heard before, but you will introduce new vocabulary along with visual cues, hand signals, repetition and dramatizations such that they begin to naturally grasp the basic meaning of your communications. If you are pointing to a picture of water and repeatedly saying, "Agua," students will begin to associate that word with water. When you follow up with a mini-dramatization of drinking a cup of water and then offer studets a cup of water, they will confirm their suspicion that “agua” must indeed mean "water."
» What are your goals for students with this program?
Answer:
The primary goal of Calico Spanish is to develop a student's receptive language skills. This means the students will begin to understand messages spoken to them in Spanish. Once a student has a basic framework for understanding a language, they can begin to build confidence in creating their own messages in that language. Initially, you will expect your students to respond to the Spanish language, and eventually, you will assist them in creating their own simple sentences to communicate their own ideas in Spanish.
Krashen and Terrell advocate building this type of language comprehension prior to rigorous grammar studies. Calico Spanish follows this approach and you will not find any formal grammar studies in this program though you will present simple sentence building exercises. Once students have completed Calico Spanish Levels 1 and 2, they will be ready to begin studying Spanish grammar.
» What do you expect from students during lessons?
Answer:
Calico Spanish focuses on comprehension. You will use Spanish as much as possible, but you do not need to require students to limit themselves to Spanish during the program. Allow students to ask questions in English. If your skills are sufficient, you can repeat the question back to them in Spanish and then answer them in Spanish. Whenever you can, encourage your students to use the words they know in Spanish, but don’t expect fluency or frustrate them by expecting them immediately to be able to utilize the new vocabulary as fluently as you might be doing with the scripts. These abilities build gradually, and the initial focus of the lessons is helping the children to understand Spanish and practice pronouncing words through songs, reciting or repeating words from the calendar and answering simple questions with very simple responses.
Students should be allowed a silent period during their Spanish acquisition. (See Krashen and Terrell's work on the Natural Approach to learn more about this phase of language acquisition.) We attempt to shorten the silent period through our engaging songs and activities, but in reality, the duration of the silent period can vary greatly from student to student.
» What does the teacher's manual include?
Answer:
The teacher's manual includes a lesson plan for either a 30 minute or 60 minute class schedule. This allows you to quickly review the suggested topics and also gather necessary supplies. The chapters are segmented by topic (alphabet, games, activities, music, etc.), so you can easily shorten or extend or review items from the suggested schedule as needed to best serve your students. Extension activities are also frequently recommended to provide additional opportunities to connect various lesson components and also give students more practice with writing and reading in Spanish. Each lesson component includes a script that you can use as a guide to present lessons to students. Calico Spanish presents certain concepts repeatedly through each chapter and the scripts provide reminders to frequently include those concepts in your lesson presentation. For example when teaching students the verb "necesitar" the scripts will show you how you can repeat that verb throughout your lesson to give students lots of exposure to that verb. You can see a sample of the teacher's manual at this link.
» Can I use Calico Spanish with children younger than 5 or non-readers?
Answer:
Yes you can. The program is very visual and interactive, so that a non-reader can participate and learn successfully. We have preschools that are using the program with modifications because they love the visuals, games and music so much. The visual aids are well designed and students can comprehend the meaning by the images regardless of their reading skills.
» Do you offer a money back guarantee?
Answer:
Yes we do. Please read the specifics of our policy on our legal page.
» Why is your CD called Mi guitarrí rather than Mi guitarra?
Answer:
We named the CD after our version of a traditional Spanish singing game of musical chairs. In an old Spanish textbook from the early 1900's we located a poem and the instructions for this wonderful game in which students play musical chairs while listening to the sound of Mi guitarrí (a pet name for the singer’s guitar.)
Students listen and finally the singer says, “…to the rhythm of my guitarrí-CO!” and upon hearing the addition of the syllable, “-CO,” students scramble for a seat.
Answer:
In Spanish, titles are written with a sentence case. In other words, only the first letter of titles is capitalized.
» How is the book ¡Corre, perro, corre! (Go, Dog! Go!) used?
Answer:
Go, Dog, Go (Corre, perro, corre) is read aloud to the students during the program as a method of introducing very simple literature and allowing stuents to see that they are learning enough language to comprehend a storybook. The book illustrates opposites, colors and more.
» Do you have stories in your curriculum?
Answer:
The curriculum is not story based. We do have plans to develop a supplemental literature
component that would include picture books in Spanish. In the meantime, we will post our favorite storybooks from time to time on our blog.
» What verbs are included in the Verbos flash card set?
Answer:
The Verbos flash cards are published by Trend Enterprises, Inc. We don't have their permission to issue a complete list of included verbs, but there are a total of 93. Some of our favorite verbs in that set are correr, comer, abrir, bailar, cortar, dar, dibujar, escribir, leer, llamar, limpiar, ir, pegar, nadar, reír, tirar, tomar, voltear, servir, plantar, and empujar.
There are also some less commonly used verbs such as deslizar and estornudar. The images on the cards do a wonderful job of illustrating what each verb means.
» What words are included in the Calico Spanish Flash card set?
Answer:
The Calico Spanish Flash card set goes with the program and includes an image and word for each letter of the alphabet, eleven colors/shapes, eleven faces to answer the question "How are you?" morning, noon, night, four sets of opposites, 21 animals and the numbers 1-15.
In addition, we provide you with present tense verb conjugations of the verbs poder, necesitar, ir, querer and gustar (to be able, to need, to want, to go, and to like). There are a few additional images that are useful during various lessons such as the clock, Señor Reloj and a beautiful little farm scene titled La granja. In total our flash card set includes 149 flash cards.
