Tierra: A Family's Guide to Learning Spanish Together, TEMA 1 (THEME 1)

Structure of the daily lesson

Sample of weekly lesson plan

How does Tierra align with Charlotte Mason’s Principles?

Description

Tierra is centered around the telling of Spanish-language folktales originally written for a Spanish-speaking audience. I have been given permission by the authors to adapt these stories to make them more accessible to a language-learning audience while maintaining their original authenticity and integrity. Each 12-week theme offers a new story and set of hand-drawn puppets. Scripts, storytelling tips, and demonstration videos support the teacher through the storytelling process. The oral storytelling component is accompanied by reading and writing tasks for LEVEL 2 students (yrs 4/5-8) that include copywork, translation, dictation, and written narration.

Additional resources offer the opportunity to:

• learn useful phrases

• practice pronunciation

• describe the date and weather

• interact with print materials displayed in your home

• sing folksongs and hymns

• recite scripture and poetry

• go on Spanish language nature walk

• follow a Spanish language recipe

• read Spanish language picture books

• practice verb meanings and conjugations with movement and gesture

Curriculum design and use

Tierra follows a three-year cycle and offers TWO levels which means that students who finish the first three-year cycle at LEVEL 1 (yrs 1-4/Forms I-IIB), can cycle back and use this guide again at LEVEL 2 (yrs 5-8/Forms IIA-III). This provides a total of six years of content for students who begin at LEVEL 1 and three years of content for students who begin at LEVEL 2.

Year 1: Themes 1-3

Year 2: Themes 4-6

Year 3: Themes 7-9

Students starting this program during years 1-4/Forms I-IIB (LEVEL 1), can cycle back and use this guide again at LEVEL 2 .

Students starting this program during years 5-8/Forms IIA-III (LEVEL 2) will complete only one cycle. At this point, they can move onto further language study using other methods and materials.

Your family can start using the Tierra guide at the beginning of any term (fall, winter, spring) as long as you start with Tema 1. All students (years 1-8) using this guide for the first time should start with Tema 1.

Sequence of learning

The four language skills are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This is the order we learn them in our native language and Tierra approaches second language learning in the same way. This is also the sequence followed by Charlotte Mason who believed that children should learn a second language orally in the early forms.

Target audience

Tierra was designed for Charlotte Mason home educators, but can serve as a language-learning tool for any family to whom its content and approach is of interest and use.

This guide is written for home educators with a wide variety of proficiency levels - those with basic to intermediate speaking skills as well as native speakers who are looking for tools to help them use Spanish alongside their children. It can be used individually or with a multi-age group of students, providing tasks for different ages and abilities within each term (years 1-8/Forms I-III).

How Tierra began

Tierra began as a selection of Spanish-language stories and rhymes to share with my children. I wanted to introduce them to a rich variety of sound features and structural aspects of the Spanish language within the context of stories that captured their imagination. I documented what we did each month which evolved into a yearly plan for language-learning. This plan continued to grow with my children; we repeated old elements while adding in new, fresh content.

When telling stories, I use props such as animal figurines or paper puppets to deepen their experience and enjoyment of the story and to help them use Spanish as we tell a story together. This curriculum uses hand-drawn puppets that have been created for each story. Tierra combines my research and fieldwork as a linguist and 15 years as a classroom educator with the methods I have been using at home with my own children; singing, storytelling, reading, and creativity have been my most powerful tools for raising children bilingually.

In using Tierra, my hope is that your family will feel awakened to the joys of language learning and left with a desire to learn more Spanish or other languages as they move on from this program.

“Those who have used them know what Miss Mason’s Geography Books do for the children, how they present pictures of the sport to the mind’s eye, and treat of those matters which the traveller and reader seek to be instructed upon, leaving a taste and a desire to read more about it all later on.

Foreign languages may be taught in the same way, though here the teacher has even more help in the materials she is using, for she has as her handmaid, the beautiful imagery of the language she is teaching, the joy of the sound and rhythm of the beautiful words. But she, as well as her pupil, must see the fresh horizon that opens out and the new light that plays upon her own language, as it is made more intelligible through the study of a foreign tongue, teacher and taught must be inspired by the sympathy towards those who are strangers to them and whose language has hitherto been but a sound in their ears.”

[PNEU article by E.A. Parish, Imagination as a Powerful Factor in a Well-balanced Mind. Volume 25, no.5, 1914, pp. 379-390.]