¡Hola from the clase de español! In Spanish class for Spanish Immersion students, each week focuses on culture through a country unit study and a

Spanish grammar concept. Currently the third graders are studying Puerto Rico. We began this unit by identifying

important geographical features on the map of Puerto Rico as well as talking about

the flag and the symbols it represents. The students also made a short book that

highlights other important national symbols. Afterwards, we began studying many

stories from Puerto Rican culture. We first heard the story the legend of the coquí

using a book called El Kiki Kokí. The coquí is a beloved Puerto Rican frog

around which many stories and art are centered. The legend explains how this

frog got its golden color along with its name. After hearing the story, students

made their own origami coquís. Next we explored the myth La flor de pro -

The Golden Flower which

tells the story of how

the island of Puerto Rico came to be

according to the native Puerto Rican Taíno peoples. Lastly,

we’re reading a story about Juan Bobo, a famous Puerto

Rican story character that always seems to get things

backwards. After hearing

this story, the third

graders will work on

writing their own

Juan Bobo story.

During our grammar

classes, the third

graders recently finished exploring the concept of adjective agreement. We

identified what adjectives are and how they work together with nouns in Spanish

to add description to our writing or speaking. To practice the targeted concepts,

groups of students completed a poster project where they wrote adjectives that

described their picture applying the concepts they learned about making sure that the noun and adjectives agreed

grammatically. Right now we have just begun talking about present tense verb conjugation. Students are working

through a book called Un día feliz - A Happy Day to identify the various verb-ending structures and play around with

these patterns to discover how a change in verb ending alters the person performing the verb action.

¡Muchas gracias!

Srta. DeVries - mdevries@grcs.org