Second-grade Spanish Thematic Integrated Curriculum That Promotes Academic Achievement and Language Acquisition

For students in dual language education programs, there is beauty in the fact that their educational experience is in a multilingual environment with goals of high academic achievement, bilingualism and biliteracy, and cross-cultural competency. Through their experience in the program, students have shown growth in acquisition of both languages, however, not all are preforming at grade level. There are many reasons contributing to this problem, including a lack of materials and resources necessary to systematically teach language with thematic and authentic experiences that promote academic achievement and language acquisition. This curriculum project, designed for second grade dual language classroom, was developed to support the current curriculum in order to promote language acquisition and academic achievement by using the Understanding by Design Framework developed by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. By intentionally planning the desired outcomes, formative and summative assessments that offer data in relation to the desired results, and finally, an intentional lesson plan with the focus of academic achievement and language acquisition via cooperative learning and thematic instruction, this curriculum seeks to offer second grade dual language educators a readily available resource for their classroom that promotes academic achievement and language acquisition for all students.