The last week of school I wanted to check my students’ vocabularies in a general way, so I gave them a list of the top 400 Spanish words (Available as a pdf on the Free Stuff page here: https://www.brycehedstrom.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/TOP-400-SPANISH-WORDS.pdf ).  Students were asked to check off the words that they could translate into English easily or could use in a sentence in Spanish.  I expected the Spanish 3 students to know more, of course, but the Spanish I students really surprised me.  Here are the average results:

Spanish I = 313 words

Spanish 3 = 369 words

I expected there to be more of a difference between the two levels. I suppose that this is confirmation of Blaine Ray’s assertion that we can teach all levels in one class.