As Wesley Menke walked back to the classroom where he teaches Spanish, he interrupted himself to point to the red rocks that surround the West Sedona School campus. “Beautiful view, isn’t it?” 

It’s one he remembers well. 

Menke once attended West Sedona, and now, he is in his first year of teaching there. Menke’s lessons, which he teaches to every grade level through sixth, are in what he called an “experimental phase” implemented by the Sedona-Oak Creek School District — the first Spanish class taught to kids at West Sedona. 

Before he ended up back home, Menke graduated from Northern Arizona University and taught Spanish to elementary students in California for seven years. 

“I remember growing up here and having friends that spoke Spanish, and of course in high school we were required to take it, and then I minored in Spanish and just loved it,” Menke said. 

Menke said that at the start of his career there were those who frequently warned that teaching the language to elementary kids would be difficult because students will be coming in with all different kinds of backgrounds; after all, first-graders who speak Spanish at home will have a significant advantage on those who have never encountered the language before, and there isn’t an option to organize classes based on skill level.  

“While that dynamic is true, what I found is that it created this really cool atmosphere where it’s almost like a flip-flop of the rest of the school day,” Menke said. “If you can imagine being a student who is maybe new to the country and you are struggling to learn English — in this class, it’s like the roles reverse.” 

In Menke’s class, those students who otherwise might feel insecure about their skills compared to their peers earn a much-needed confidence boost. 

“My leaders in here are the ones that are already really good at Spanish, and it gives them a chance to shine, but in a helpful way,” he said. 

Menke arranges the seating such that the more advanced students are next to those who need the most help. Witnessing the natural tendency of the kids to want to help each other succeed is what Menke said has been the most rewarding part of the program so far.  Throughout the week, he welcomes in every level from kindergartners, with whom he provides a more streamlined, vocabulary-heavy curriculum, to sixth-graders, whom he challenges with difficult readings of current event articles. 

Menke said that, aside from the littlest students at West Sedona, he tries to build his curriculum around a strong grammar focus, seeing the nuts and bolts of sentence structure as the most important part of students’ learning. 

“We work a lot on verbs, conjugating, first person, second person, third person, etc., so it’s really been a combination of vocab and grammar,” Menke said. “What’s great about [general grammar], too, is that if you are learning English, it connects to your English language arts. 

“If you speak English all the time, you never think about it, but if you learn grammar in a second language, you realize ‘oh wow, I never realized I use that same grammar rule every day when I speak.’” 

Menke, who studied abroad in the picturesque colonial city of Santiago de Querétaro, two hours northwest of Mexico City, said he loves to also teach students about the cultures of various Spanish-speaking countries. 

Students in his class learned about Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, participated in traditions related to the Navidad prelude holiday of Las Posadas and are looking forward to a Cinco de Mayo celebration later in the spring. 

For West Sedona’s Wildcat Carnival, Menke’s students began making pinatas after a Spanish-speaking parent suggested that it’d be a great way for the class to contribute to the festivities. Though his classes cranked out more than enough for the carnival in a short time, Menke realized that crafting paper-mache pinatas was not only an effective way to shake things up and ensure that attention spans don’t drift away amidst grammar lessons, but that it was, after all, a great lesson itself. 

Menke will have a simple question of the day that students are required to answer in Spanish; answers to prompts from “what’s your favorite activity” to “what’s your favorite food” now hang from the ceiling of the classroom in the form of colorful pinatas. 

Aside from arts and crafts, Menke said that he loves teaching through music, whether it’s songs created solely for the purpose of language instruction or it’s pop culture classics like “La Macarena” — which his classes have mastered. 

Though starting a new program has its inherent challenges, Menke said he believes the class is going well overall. 

“I really applaud Sedona-Oak Creek School District for taking the chance to do something new, especially in a time where you turn on the news and there’s a lot of difficult things when it comes to issues like immigration, and people can have really strong feelings about that,” he said. 

“Yet here, in the classroom, it’s about learning a language, about learning a culture, and that really has value. I feel totally privileged because I get to see that positive side of it where different student populations come together and have friendships, support one another and see the giftedness in one another.”