The night before my first subbing assignment, I looked up the school website and noticed the school had a really unique bilingual program.  For every grade level, there was one classroom conducted in English and another classroom conducted in Spanish.  I hadn’t indicated anywhere in my substitute teaching profile that I knew how to speak another language, so I didn’t think I would be assigned to the Spanish speaking class.  But, I think you know where this story is headed.  The next morning, I discovered I was going to be teaching a 5th grade class for the full day in the Spanish speaking class.

Our schedule for the day included blocks for Language Arts, Math and Social Studies.  Thankfully, another teacher who was fluent in Spanish, came into our classroom to conduct the Language Arts lesson, where students read a passage in Spanish and had to answer questions.  During math time, we reviewed the concepts of area and perimeter for rectangles.  Since the language of math is universal, I was able to easily understand the math worksheets, even though they were in Spanish.  I was able to get through the day, since most students knew English.  For the students I could not communicate with, technology came to the rescue.  I used Google translate on iPad, which I realized later could transform picture books:

That experience got me thinking about how I could better equip myself to communicate in Spanish because in California, the vast majority of English Language Learners are Hispanic.  According to the California Department of Education, the native language of over 80% of ELLs is Spanish.  With that in mind, I developed a quick pocket guide of useful Spanish phrases to use in the classroom, categorized into subject area.  While this is by no means an exhaustive list, I believe having something at my fingertips will lead to smoother communication, because even with Google translate on the iPad, it takes a little while to type in what I want to say to the student.  With the help of my Spanish-speaking classmates, ChatGPT and Google Translate, I compiled these phrases for teachers to use in the elementary classroom. Download my Spanish Pocket Guide for Teachers, and customize it to include the phrases you find yourself turning to most often in the classroom.