Spanish class at PNA is off to a roaring start!  The middle school is already diving into 100% Spanish stories — listening, acting, speaking and even writing.  This early in the year, it can be daunting for students to jump right in and get their second-language-acquisition brains pumping at full speed. Knowing this is an inevitable consequence of summer, the PNA Spanish program is structured in a way that makes students who are both very experienced with the language and students who are brand new to it comfortable and filled with a can-do feeling of power to understand and operate in Spanish right from the start.

Courage, as noted in the PNA mission, is an inexorable part of Spanish class — speaking a new language is bound to cause some anxiety in learners. To give students that courage, the first story the class tackles is packed full of cognates — words that sound similar in both languages.  The story is relatively complex and touches on many high-frequency verbs while still providing lots of lifelines to the student.  Those lifelines inspire confidence in students, which improves their courage to participate in the story activities as they grow in complexity.  In this unit, students heard the story three times, then were given the story chopped into strips and mixed up for them to rearrange, then read the story and a more complex, but still intelligible, version, and finally wrote, read aloud, and acted out their own slightly modified versions of it. These activities culminated in a test of courage when each student had to recite the story using only an 8-picture guide to remind them of the phrases and events they had learned.

At PNA, students get the collaboration, individual teacher support, and learning environment they need to inspire that courage which they will use their entire lives.  There is fun, there is active movement, there is academic challenge, and most of all there is a safety net for them to feel like they can take risks and push themselves without fear of social or emotional repercussions.  This is the PNA difference and it is happening every day – even in the first weeks of school!

PNA Band is Five Years Old! You Should Join!

Thank you to everyone who came to meet our friends from the Horn Doctor/Alaska Music & Sound.  If you are interested in joining PNA Band and could not make the meeting, please see Ms. Katie for details about renting an instrument.
And don’t forget to pick up your book!  All students will use the Standard of Excellence book for their instrument.

Art classes are in full swing, and your student needs an art smock! Please send an old over-sized shirt for your child to wear during class that will protect their school clothes from all the wonderful mediums we use. Thanks!