Presidio Hill School begins teaching Spanish in third grade.  The program is an engaging one with students participating in creative hands-on projects and activities that develop   language skills and equip students with useful, life-long language acquisition strategies.

The objectives are to develop, reinforce, and refine communicative competency in listening, speaking, reading, writing, and culture.  Through an inductive approach, students gain an intuitive understanding of how the language is acquired and how they can use this knowledge to express themselves linguistically. 

Differentiation of Language instruction takes place by adapting the contents and techniques to the differing abilities and needs of the students.  The various methodologies employed take into consideration different learning styles.  Among the methodologies incorporated are the Natural Approach, Total Physical Response (TPR) and TPR Story Telling.  These methods presuppose that world-language instruction should meet students' communicative needs.  Students begin by acquiring the vocabulary, phrases, structures and eventually the grammatical and written skills appropriate to and useful in their everyday environment.

Spanish at Presidio Hill School is an integrated experience drawing on students' art and drama abilities as well as writing, speaking and presentational skills. For example, students will read and listen to a book in Spanish and using the target vocabulary they have learned and utilizing TPR techniques, they write their own story.  Students bring their story's characters to life by drawing or modeling them in clay or other materials. Finally, students give a dramatic presentation of their story and receive a review of their work from their classmates.