These past few weeks, our second graders have been working very hard to know how to count in Spanish. And now, they can count well over 500!

We’ve combined numbers with an element of mathematics, so now we can do addition and subtraction knowing the words for “plus”(más), “minus”(menos), and “equals”(es/son). It has been tricky to translate a Spanish equation to English, doing the math, then translating it back to Spanish to say the answer. As in any case with a foreign language, the more you stretch your brain, the easier it gets. Soon we should see that we can complete simple math problems without the translating step! It’s a great thing to see a Spanish learner begin to think and calculate in a language that is not their primary language!!