The problem I set out to solve
Bilingual teachers kept asking the same question: what is the right way to teach Spanish grammar in a bilingual classroom? The materials available to them were translations of English programs. They carried an English sequence into a language that doesn't share it.
The mismatch is concrete. English has long and short vowels, so English word study builds early instruction around vowel patterns. Spanish vowels are always short and invariable. A translated program spends weeks on a distinction that doesn't exist, then skips the features that actually govern Spanish: syllable structure, stress, accent rules, morphology.
Teachers weren't short on effort or materials. They were working from a map of the wrong language. Every classroom I visited had a Spanish word wall organized like an English one.
How I framed the opportunity
We started from the research rather than from a product idea. Donald Bear established word study in English in the early 1990s: teach children to recognize patterns in words instead of memorizing disconnected lists. In 2003, Irma Trujillo and her colleagues at Gadsden ISD tested whether that method could transfer to Spanish and found that it couldn't be translated, because the two languages have fundamentally different word features.
That finding was our opening. The method was sound. The feature set was wrong. So we built the feature set.
Before any curriculum, we mapped 72 Spanish word features and sequenced them by complexity, updating and extending Trujillo's original research. Everything else in the product is downstream of that inventory. Without it we would have been guessing at scope and sequence like everyone else.
We published the framework manual as a free download and sold Librolandia, the curriculum built on it. Teachers could adopt our thinking at no cost and decide for themselves whether the sequence made sense in their classroom. The manual did the convincing, and it is why the product spread teacher to teacher with no marketing spend.
We released Kindergarten through 1st grade first rather than waiting for a complete K-5 program. That let us learn from real classrooms while the later stages were still in design.
How the framework is structured
Seven sequential stages run from Kindergarten through 5th grade: Stages A, B, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Each stage carries three components that advance together.
Word features
The Spanish patterns taught at that stage
Orthographic norms
The composition and style rules that go with those features
Bilingual metalinguistic awareness
How the two languages inform each other
| Stage | Grade | Focus |
|---|---|---|
| A | K | Vowels, regular consonants. Phonological awareness. |
| B | K–1 | Consonant clusters, digraphs, syllables. Capitalization. Identical cognates. |
| 1 | 1st | Complex syllables, multi-sound letters, diéresis. Stressed syllable. Near-identical cognates. |
| 2 | 2nd | Gender and number morphemes, silent H. Morphological awareness begins. |
| 3 | 3rd | Person morphemes, enclitic pronouns, prefixes, suffixes, compound words. Cognates by root. |
| 4 | 4th | Person and tense morphemes, hiatus, diphthong, written accent. |
| 5 | 5th | Emphatic and diacritical accents, polysyllabic stress. |
The cognate work is the piece I'm proudest of architecturally. It progresses deliberately across all seven stages: identical words first, then near-identical ones, then words that share only a root. A child's two languages are treated as one resource that compounds rather than two systems held apart.
The curriculum opens each stage with a full-length story. Recurring characters carry the word features, and those same characters appear in every game and activity in that stage, so the pattern a child is learning has a face attached to it.
An assessment that places a child at their first error
The assessment is a 25-item dictation at two levels, initial and intermediate, that a teacher administers in 20 to 30 minutes to a whole class, a small group, or one child.
It measures two things at once. Dictated words test whether a child can apply phonological awareness to the target features. Fill-in-the-blank sentence items test morphological awareness by asking the child to manipulate morphemes in context. At the time we built it, no other Spanish word study assessment on the market did both.
A raw score estimates a child's developmental stage. The per-feature breakdown confirms it. Then comes the rule that shaped everything: a child is placed at the stage of their FIRST error, not their overall score.
A student scoring 4 out of 5 on vowels and 4 out of 4 on consonants gets instruction on vowels, because vowels are where the foundation cracked. Total score would have moved that child forward on top of a gap. Word study builds cumulatively, so the first gap is the only one that matters.
Getting a feature right isn't the same as understanding it. We built in two guards. Teachers corroborate a passed feature against the child's independent writing, and they ask the child to explain the rule out loud. A correct answer with no explanation behind it is a coin flip, and a placement decision shouldn't rest on one.
The full inventory runs two or three times a year. Between those, a teacher who thinks a child has cleared a stage re-tests only the four or five words belonging to that stage. Confirming mastery takes minutes instead of a class period, which is the difference between a system teachers use and one they abandon by November.
How we built it
Phase 1: Research and feature inventory. Reviewed the biliteracy research, worked from Trujillo's Gadsden ISD findings, and mapped 72 Spanish word features into a complexity-ordered continuum.
Phase 2: The assessment. Designed the two-level inventory, student response sheets, analysis guide, scoring-to-placement logic, and administration protocol.
Phase 3: Librolandia, K-1 first. Built the curriculum for the earliest stages: stories, characters, games, and word banks. Released K through 1st grade and learned from classrooms while later stages were in design.
Phase 4: Growth by word of mouth. Published the framework manual free. Teachers adopted it, told other teachers, and the paid curriculum followed them into more than 1,000 classrooms with no marketing spend.
Making the scoring guide unambiguous for a teacher working alone at her desk. Partial credit was the trap. We settled on a rule anyone can apply consistently: within a multi-letter feature box, any single error marks the whole box wrong, and a fully correct box earns one point. Accents count. Consistency mattered more than granularity, because a placement system only works if two teachers score the same paper the same way.
I co-founded Acento with Laura Rainey and served as Product Director. I designed the assessment system and led product design end to end. Laura and I co-authored the framework manual. We built on Irma Trujillo's research at Gadsden ISD and worked with the teaching faculty at Mundo Verde Bilingual PCS, who tested everything in real classrooms. Erica Van Autreve contributed to the framework.
What happened
The product was paid, and it grew teacher by teacher. No sales team, no ad budget, no conference booth. Teachers downloaded the free framework, tried the sequence with their own students, and told other teachers.
We never established predictive validity. I know the assessment placed children sensibly, because teachers told us the groupings finally matched what they saw. I can't tell you it predicted later reading outcomes, because we never ran that study. If I built this again, the validation plan would exist before the first classroom used it. That belief is why I now map evaluation at the birth of a product instead of bolting it on at the end.
Where this could go
Acento is on hold. The framework hasn't aged, because Spanish hasn't changed, and the gap it addressed is still open in most bilingual programs.
Digitize the assessment. The scoring and placement logic is rule-based and deterministic, which makes it straightforward to automate. Teachers would get placement and grouping instantly instead of hand-scoring 25 items per child.
Connect to progress monitoring. Stage-level mastery checks are already designed for frequent, lightweight use. Tracked over time they would produce a real growth picture for Spanish literacy, which almost no bilingual program currently has.
What I learned building this
The biggest lesson: the assessment was the product. We thought we were building a curriculum with an assessment attached. Teachers told us otherwise. What they needed was to know where each child actually was and what to do on Monday. The curriculum mattered because the placement was trustworthy.
The second lesson is about the free manual. Giving away the thinking is what made the product spread. Teachers don't adopt a sequence because a catalog says to. They adopt it when they understand why it is ordered the way it is and recognize their own students in it.