Spanish Language Arts (SLA), Artes del lenguaje del español (ALE)

A key tenet of dual and bilingual education is the elevation of the Spanish language, and our district recognizes the significant value of using all linguistic assets in the classroom for language development. Skyline’s Spanish Language Arts/Artes del lenguaje del español curriculum builds upon our students’ cultural and linguistic diversity to develop advanced literacy skills. This new curriculum is directly aligned to the Skyline English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum and is designed to allow teachers to tailor instruction to build on students’ strengths and lived experiences.

Development Schedule

Since 2022, the district has worked in partnership with content experts, principals, teachers, and external partners to develop fully-articulated, culturally-relevant, and rigorous SLA/ALE curriculum at a more accelerated pace than the first wave of Skyline curricula was developed. In order to ensure that teachers and students have access to these materials as soon as possible, materials will be available on a rolling basis. Please refer to the schedule below for more information on when resources will be available:

Kindergarten - Grade 5

Grades 6-8

Grades 9-12

About the Curricular Materials

The Skyline SLA/ALE curriculum is aligned with the Biliteracy Block, which highlights how sections are organized. Oracy is specifically addressed as well as word study, reading, and writing. Additionally, there is a specific focus on cross-linguistic connections. The curriculum uses flexible pedagogical practices that expand students' abilities to analyze the similarities and differences between and within their languages and that deepen understanding of subject matter, strengthen language competence, and nurture powerful literacy competencies. In particular, Skyline’s SLA/ALE materials:

1. Provide teachers with guidelines on how to establish cross-linguistic connections informally throughout the lesson.
2. Include multiple opportunities within a unit for side-by-side structured analysis of Spanish and English language features

The essential questions in Skyline’s ELA and SLA/ALE courses are the same in order to support conversations among teams at the school level as well as support dual language education and translanguaging. Additionally, the texts have been selected to reflect similar themes, but the units are uniquely written for each language. Teachers can plan together at the unit thematic level, but the texts, lessons, and sequence are distinct.

Grades K-5

Each course within the K-5 curriculum has eight units, with approximately 20 lessons per unit.

Foundational Skills are an integral part of each course and are informed by the standards of Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Spain to create a comprehensive list and sequence of learning in reading foundations. The foundational skills instruction includes oral language development as well as opportunities to encode and decode with decodables and dictados among other strategies.

For K-5, the Skyline SLA/ALE units are aligned to Social Science and Science in order to allow for content based literacy.

Grades 6-12

The Grade 6-12 curriculum consists of three modules, with each module containing three units that are guided by a shared Essential Question.

Within a module, each unit builds on one another over approximately 10 lessons per unit, meaning the knowledge students develop in the first unit of a module supports their work in the second and third unit.

For Grades 6-12, the Skyline SLA/ALE units are aligned to Social Science in order to allow for content based literacy.

Text Selection

Throughout the Skyline SLA/ALE curriculum development process, a key priority of the Skyline curriculum team has been the identification of authentic texts. Beginning with the Feria internacional del libro in Guadalajara, Mexico, the team has developed close partnerships with publishing houses and distributors across Latin America to find rich texts that are authentically written in Spanish or have strong, authentic translations.

See the current list of texts that serve as the foundation of the Skyline SLA/ALE curriculum.