Level 1 · Novice · 10 assignments
Foundational present tense across all variants — regular, irregular, stem-changing, reflexive, plus the present participle for the present progressive.
Voces 1 has 11 chapters; this VerbMaster curriculum has 10 assignments. The mapping isn't 1:1 — we only built assignments where the textbook content involves verb conjugation.
| # | VerbMaster Assignment | Textbook Chapter |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ser y Estar | Ch 3 |
| 2 | Tener | Ch 4 |
| 3 | Ir | Ch 5 |
| 4 | Regular -AR Verbs | Ch 5 |
| 5 | Regular -ER/-IR Verbs | Ch 6 |
| 6 | Gustar, Encantar & IOPs | Ch 7 |
| 7 | Irregular Verbs | Ch 9 |
| 8 | Stem-Changing Verbs | Ch 10 |
| 9 | Reflexive Verbs | Ch 11 |
| 10 | Present Progressive | Ch 11 |
Chapters with no VerbMaster assignment: Ch 1 (alphabet, numbers, pronouns — no verbs), Ch 2 (gustar via the textbook's construction form — see below), Ch 8 (comparatives/superlatives — no conjugation work).
Suggested start: around week 2-3 of the school year, once you've finished the Chapter 1 alphabet/intro material. The first VerbMaster assignment (Ser y Estar) technically aligns with Chapter 3 in the book — but you don't need to wait that long. Ser and Estar are foundational, and giving students a head start drilling them means they'll arrive at Chapter 3 with a real base.
At roughly 2 weeks per assignment, the 10 assignments fill ~20 weeks of core work. That leaves comfortable buffer in a 36-week year for breaks, review, and the assignments that usually take longer than 2 weeks — irregulars and stem-changers especially.
Heads-up on auto-generated due dates
VerbMaster's default due-date algorithm spaces assignments 1 week apart, which is faster than the 2-week cadence this curriculum is designed for. Plan to adjust manually — either bump every assignment to 2-week spacing, or stretch out the harder ones and leave the smaller ones at 1 week.
You don't have to micromanage any of this
Customize as much as you like, but you're equally welcome to set it up once and walk away. The spaced-repetition engine handles per-student personalization behind the scenes. Set-it-and-forget-it is a totally valid mode.
The textbook introduces gustar early, via the familiar a mí me gusta construction. VerbMaster's gustar drill is deliberately placed later in the year — alongside the textbook's deeper treatment of gustar and the surrounding verbs (encantar, preferir, querer). That alignment is the natural moment to have the construction-vs-conjugation conversation with students.
The "why" — and a suggested classroom note to give students when they first hit the gustar drill — is on the main Voces companion hub. Voces 1 is the only book where this matters; subsequent levels just inherit the convention.
Every verb form a student masters this year stays in their VerbMaster account. Realistically, most students won't touch Spanish all summer — so when they show up to Spanish 2, they'll find a pile of Mastery Reviews waiting: every form they've gone shaky on, surfaced automatically by the spaced-repetition system, prioritized by what that individual student personally needs to refresh. They work through the pile; they're back up to speed. You don't lose the first weeks of Spanish 2 reteaching last year to a class with mixed retention — the system handles it per-student, in the background, while you move forward with new content.
The investment compounds. By Spanish 4, a student who came up through VerbMaster has the entire foundational conjugation system drilled and re-drilled across years, freeing class time for the harder usage and composition work the later books emphasize. A solid year of Voces 1 is the foundation for the four-year arc.