For the first time, Exploratory and other middle school language course instructors can embark on the journey toward Acquisition Driven Instruction with a dependable roadmap. The Vamos Curriculum is a new program from The Comprehensible Classroom, and it is written especially for middle schoolers. Whether your Spanish language course sequence begins with an optional Exploratory course, a full-year middle school Spanish course, or something in-between, The Vamos Curriculum can help your students build a strong communicative foundation from the moment they foot in Spanish class.
What to expect from Vamos
The Vamos Curriculum consists of 10 highly engaging units designed to help students experience the richness and diversity of the Spanish speaking world. Each unit transports students to a different Spanish speaking country to explore authentic cultural practices.
Vamos teaches content, not vocabulary.
Instead of units focused on topical vocabulary lists, Vamos uses high-frequency vocabulary to describe, narrate, and explain stories and informational content that are interesting and relevant to middle grades learners. The result is that students acquire language naturally as they learn about each other and the world. Students develop the ability to communicate about a wide range of topics and accomplish unrehearsed tasks because they can confidently understand and express themselves using words like can, has, goes, wants, needs, likes, does, and is.
Each unit begins by introducing students to a new, small set of Core Vocabulary. These are words that will be used repeatedly throughout the unit to share the featured content. Learn more about the role of Core Vocabulary »
Once students understand the meaning of the most important new words for the unit, the fun begins! The narrative phase of the unit features many different kinds of storytelling:
- Students telling personal stories through conversation
- The teacher narrating stories told through short films
- The class co-creating stories
- The class inventing characters
All of our curricular units begin with a narrative phase because stories are easier to understand than informational content. Students' brains are working hard to process vocabulary that is new to them, and the narrative context makes it easier. Students spend anywhere from four to eight class periods in the narrative phase!
After the narrative phase, Vamos uses the same Core Vocabulary to describe or explain a cultural product, practice, or perspective. This is the information phase! By this point, most students will recognize the unit's Core Vocabulary when they read or hear it in context. For that reason, understanding facts that are expressed with the Core Vocabulary doesn't feel as daunting.
By following this sequence in each unit and spiraling Core Vocabulary from unit to unit, you will be amazed by what students can understand at a deep level throughout their year with Vamos:
Vamos is an acquisition-focused Spanish curriculum.
Vamos supports language acquisition by using a limited vocabulary range and recycling Core Vocabulary from unit to unit. Teachers are empowered to teach in the target language because the curriculum provides scripts, texts, and other tools that help students actually process the authentic target language communication.
This engagement in authentic communication creates a positive and motivating first experience in language class.
Vamos is perfect for middle school.
Vamos is filled with movement, games, creativity, Social Emotional Learning, and content-area connections. We know that Vamos is a great fit for middle school because every unit was developed responsively as our Project Manager and Vamos co-author Meghan Loveless used it to meet the needs of students in her own year-long Exploratory course.
As middle school teachers around the country have begun to use Vamos for their own classes, they agree: Vamos is perfect for middle school.
Your lessons, planned.
Even better, Vamos makes teaching easy. This complete curriculum comes with step-by-step daily lesson plans, detailed activity descriptions, student printables, slideshows, assessments, learning objectives, standards, and more. Everything you need is included.
Start your Spanish program with Vamos.
Commonly, middle school Spanish programs are complicated. Students often have multiple pathways to arrive at their first full year of Spanish 1! In the same school, different students might take a semester of Spanish, 9 weeks of Spanish, no Spanish, or a full year of Spanish before they all end up in the same Spanish 1 course.
If this sounds like your school, The Vamos Curriculum is exactly what you need. The Vamos Curriculum is written to support learners that have zero communicative ability in Spanish. Use Vamos in your pre-Spanish 1 courses to help students build a solid communicative foundation. Then, use The Somos Novice curriculum in your true Spanish 1 course. Somos 1 Unit 1 also supports students with no communicative ability in Spanish, but it uses different topics than Vamos. Students that are enrolled in Spanish for the first time will have the language support they need to begin acquiring language, and students that have already studied Spanish using Vamos will continue to acquire language as they learn about new topics.
Don’t wait until high school to start building proficiency. Purchase Vamos for your middle school Spanish program today!
