My Experience in a Spanish Immersion Program

I am from Lehigh County, PA and our local school district offers a “Spanish Immersion” program for a class of 27 students to partake in from first grade through your senior year of high school. This program is incredibly hard to get into due to the large amounts of parents wanting their kids in this program. So much so that my parents had to camp out in the parking lot of the school for three days prior to the sign up date since they were taking sign-ups on a first come first serve basis. This line of people became such a hassle that now they do a lottery system and your child’s chances of getting in the program are completely random.

The way this program works is that from first grade through fifth grade everything you learn in school is in Spanish. Yes, everything. History, math, social studies, reading; everything was taught to us in this new language and the rest of the time in class was used to learn vocabulary and work on grammar. All of my teachers in elementary school were from Spanish speaking countries so it made picking up the accent a lot easier and I learned many different dialects this way.

Once you reached middle school, the program starts to narrow. Instead of learning every subject in Spanish, we were integrated into the normal classes with other students, but our social studies class was still taught in Spanish and now we had a class dedicated to Spanish vocabulary and grammar. In high school in narrows farther to just having the one vocab/grammar Spanish class and by your junior year you are practically maxed out. We all took the AP Spanish exam, and if you’d like your senior year you can backtrack slightly and take Spanish 5 with students who weren’t in this program (I chose to take French 1 instead for fun).

The culmination of this program allowed me to go on our class trip to Spain where we spent 10 days exploring the major cities and practicing this language we had been immersed in for years. This was where I was introduced to the lovely city of Granada, which I have posted an itinerary for if you’d like to visit! It was my favorite city that we visited and the memories I made there will stick with me forever. ¡Me amo España y quiero visitar otra vez!