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.

Important Updates

Hello, educators! This year, you and your colleagues are members of 100 CPS school communities and 796 classrooms across the city using the Skyline artes del lenguaje del español (ALE) curriculum. After extensive feedback and input from our teaching community, we are thrilled to share with you the significantly revised Unit 1 of the ALE curriculum. 

Kindergarten through Grade 5 Updates:

• Foundational skills following a systematic scope and sequence, with letter sound cards and decodables being delivered to all new and continuing Skyline ALE schools
• Updated texts and text flows for a smoother instructional experience
• Process-based writing sequences to enhance student engagement and learning
• Revised assessments to better align with your instructional goals
• Unit maps to support your planning and provide an overview of each unit, further aiding your instructional preparation

Grades 6-8 Updates:

• Updated texts and text flows for a smoother instructional experience
• Process-based writing sequences to enhance student engagement and learning
• Revised assessments to better align with your instructional goals
• Updated Cross-Linguistic Connections to better align with word study objectives
• Unit maps to support your planning and provide an overview of each unit, further aiding your instructional preparation

Grades 9-12 Updates:

• General clean up and quality assurance on lessons and assessments

We have been working diligently throughout the spring and summer to bring these improvements to you. To ensure you have access to these units before you need them for instruction, we are releasing them in draft format with updates on a weekly basis. These update materials are linked below and can be found on Safari. Rest assured, these units are ready for instructional use. As the unit progresses, final touches including image uploads will be completed and made available.

Updates to Unit 2 and beyond, as well as new units, will be coming soon! We sincerely appreciate your dedication to Skyline ALE and are excited to collaborate with you throughout this academic year.

Thank you for your continued commitment and hard work.

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.

Classroom Materials

The Skyline digital curriculum is fully available to all district educators and their students. In addition to the online resources, the ALE courses include non-digital materials (e.g., classroom kits, texts). Please review the Comprehensive Skyline Materials List to preview the non-digital materials associated with the ALE curriculum.