Spanish

Susana Parodi
 
Holy Family staff member since 2002
 
Universidad de las Américas-Puebla
Portland State University
 
I completed my BA in Education at the Universidad de las Américas-Puebla, México and received my Masters in Teaching Spanish from Portland State University. I love teaching because I love children and feel that working with them is a way to author the future. I am originally from Córdoba, Veracruz, México, my husband was born in Cuba, and our son is himself a proud graduate of Holy Family Catholic School.

Learning a foreign language opens the mind and expands horizons. The student will not only learn new words but an entirely new way of expressing one’s self. Students will learn traditions and customs from various cultures in the Spanish-speaking world and hopefully realize along the way that those people, from other cultures and who speak a different language, are not so very different after all.
 
All Holy Family Catholic School kindergarten through sixth grade students receive Spanish instruction four days a week. First through sixth grades attend Spanish class for half an hour, while the kindergarten students attend for 15 minutes each of these days. Seventh and eighth grades attend three times a week for 45 minutes each time. Spanish class exposes students to enriching aspects of the Spanish language and diverse Spanish-speaking cultures. We aim to improve the students’ listening, reading comprehension, and oral skills, while expanding cultural awareness through various methods including songs, games, rhymes, study, and individual and group creations. Students will walk away not only having acquired new vocabulary and cultural facts but also with a new appreciation and love for the Spanish language.
 
The Spanish program uses the Foreign Language in the Elementary School (FLES) model: this elementary school model organizes instruction around a scope and sequence. Its goals include developing language proficiency with an emphasis on oral skills, as well as providing a gradual instruction to literacy, building cultural knowledge, and tying language learning to the content of the early grade’s curriculum.