What is Vamos?

Vamos is a new curriculum published by the Comprehensible Classroom for Exploratory Spanish courses. It is purposefully designed to meet the needs of upper elementary students, middle school students, and exploratory courses. 

Is there a preview available? 

Yes, preview the materials here. 

How long does each lesson take? 

Suggested lesson plans are written for 45 minute class periods. Modify as needed to fit your class schedule, and focus on connecting with your students and responding to their interests. You may find that you spend much more time than suggested on some activities, and much less time than what we suggest for others. There is no one ‘right’ pace for this unit.

What are the goals of Vamos? 

Instructional goals of Exploratory courses also vary from district to district. The Vamos Curriculum has been developed to support a range of goals in hopes that it will provide every teacher with the tools they need to meet the following goals:

• Fostering an interest in learning the Spanish language through engagement in a positive, student-centered course experience.

• Developing linguistic proficiency.

• Learning about a variety of places and cultural aspects of the Spanish speaking world.

• Building a foundation for Interculturality to develop through personal reflection, learning, and questioning.

What does each unit include? 

• Suggested lesson plans

• Slideshow

• Student Printables

• Paperless worksheets

• Storybuilder (except Unit 3, it includes a slideshow for One Word Images)

• Unit overview

• Bullet Planner

• All the materials for all the suggested lesson plans

  • games

  • activities

  • texts

When can I expect the next unit?

We will be developing The Vamos Curriculum throughout the 2023-2024 school year. We are not committing to a specific release schedule because we want to ensure that every unit has been thoroughly and properly reviewed and test driven before we share it with you. We know how excited you are, and we will do our best to keep new units coming regularly!

When will the bundle be available?

We will not publish a full curriculum bundle until all individual units have been published, so a bundle will not be available until the summer of 2024. If you want to start teaching with The Vamos Curriculum during the current school year, you will need to purchase the individual units as they are published.

How many units will there be?

As of February of 2024, we plan on including 9 - 10 units in the complete Vamos curriculum.

Is Vamos a one year curriculum?

Exploratory courses are extremely different from school to school. Some meet every day; some meet once per week. Some meet for a quarter; others for a semester; and still others for a full year. Our initial goal is to publish one semester of daily lesson plans (~45 minutes per day), and we will expand it to fill one year of daily lesson plans.

What is the difference between Somos and Vamos?

The Somos Curriculum is used in more than 100,000 schools worldwide in dozens of program structures. Adding The Vamos Curriculum to our offerings will allow schools greater flexibility in building fully articulated communicative, acquisition-focused programs. The Vamos Curriculum can be used in Exploratory programs or other optional language courses that precede enrollment in Spanish 1. Then, schools can confidently begin instruction in Spanish 1 courses with The Somos Curriculum for Novices, and it will be new material for both students that have worked through The Vamos Curriculum and students that are taking Spanish for the first time.

CONTENT: The Vamos Curriculum works with much of the same Core Vocabulary as The Somos Curriculum. All students benefit from robust communicative exposure to high frequency vocabulary, and students who take Vamos courses will continue to make excellent progress toward proficiency as they move into Novice level courses that are taught with The Somos Curriculum. There will be much linguistic crossover between the two programs, but the content will be different. In terms of language acquisition, this is a good thing!

AUDIENCE: The Vamos Curriculum is designed for a younger range of Novice learners. Teachers in upper elementary grades and middle school will find that Vamos units are appropriate for their students. High school teachers are welcome to use Vamos as well, but the curriculum is not written for a target audience of high schoolers. 

FORMAT: The format of The Vamos Curriculum will is almost identical to that of The Somos Curriculum. Every kind of resource that is included in Somos will also be included in Vamos: detailed teacher instructions, slideshows, printables, unit overviews, etc. One difference is that we will include top-requested activity formats from The Somos Flex Curriculum in Vamos so that we do not need to publish two separate versions of Vamos. Each Vamos unit that includes a TPRS® story will come with a Storybuilder®, for example, and we will include paperless/digital-ready formats of all student printables. For this reason, Vamos units will typically require a greater financial investment than Somos units.

What verbs does Vamos focus on?

Vamos is designed to expose students to high frequency verbs such as has, goes, wants, and likes through communicative interactions. Students are also exposed to lower frequency vocabulary in service of communication.

Where can I get support for Vamos?

The best place to get support, both technical and pedagogical, for The Vamos Curriculum is to email curriculum@comprehensibleclassroom.com. 

What if my class isn’t every day?

The Vamos Curriculum will work well in courses that meet every day or every other day for at least 30 minutes. If you see your students for less than 90 minutes per week and there is no expectation for work outside of class, we do not recommend using The Vamos Curriculum or The Somos Curriculum. 

The exception to this general suggestion would be homeschool programs in which there is a reasonable expectation that students are completing work on their own outside of class meeting days. 

What can I use while I wait?

If you are all in on The Vamos Curriculum this school year, and we are not publishing new units fast enough, there are many things that you can do between Vamos units while you wait. Here are some ideas:

• Teach a Señor Wooly song unit

• Use some of the supplemental materials listed on the Somos resource map

• Ask a story from Anne Matava’s script book

• Create One Word Images

• Conduct Special Person Interviews

Will Vamos be on Garbanzo?

Yes, as the texts from Vamos are finalized and published, we will upload them as interactive lessons to Garbanzo.