TITLE: Spanish lesson AUTHOR: Holly Walton-Buchanan, Carson City, NV GRADE LEVEL/SUBJECT: This project is suitable for any grade in middle or high school, beginning or advanced Spanish. Since I "stole" this idea from a world history teacher, it is obviously wonderfully suitable for world history class. OVERVIEW: Students learning another language often are unfamiliar with the countries where the language is spoken. I have found a way to combine language study with current events and geography. In all my classes, from beginning to advanced placement, students either choose or are assigned a country to be responsible for throughout the year. Names of all Spanish-speaking countries are placed in a hat and everyone draws a name. The first assignment is to do a little library work with the encyclopedia: name of country, president/ruler, type of government, major products, name of currency and its present value (according to Wall Street Journal). They also must draw a map of the country and locate it on the globe. Then every other Monday morning, the first 20-30 minutes are devoted to "current events": students must read the newspaper every day for the previous week(s), and either bring a clipping or a summary of something that they could find about their country. The beginning students do this in English; third year and above must do it in Spanish. If there has been no news regarding their country, they get an OK, but only if I know for sure that there really wasn't (keeps me reading every page of the newspaper, too!). At the end of the year, on the final exam, they are asked several questions about their country: What did you learn about the country that you didn't know before? Would you like to go visit the country? What would you do on your visit there? How would you get there? etc. PURPOSE: Everyone knows how bad Americans are about geography. In this project, there's no doubt that the students are learning where these Spanish-speaking countries are, and what's important or news-worthy from them. It gives students a sense of reality when studying a language - they actually start getting really interested in the language as they learn more about their country. OBJECTIVES: Students are in my Spanish classes to learn Spanish, but there is also the rest of the culture and current political situation that is important. By combining the two aims, language learning and current events, the students are practicing for the day when they actually travel to that country, or meet people from it. I've had students tell me they didn't learn a lot about all the countries, but they loved learning a lot about one of them. This means that they are interested also in speaking that country's language, too. RESOURCES/MATERIALS: Very little is needed in the way of materials, except for the posters. Student must furnish their own newspapers, or can use the school library and photocopy articles. Occasionally, I let students us Time and other news magazines. ACTIVITIES AND PROCEDURES: Preliminary work is done in the library, where students write short reports on their assigned country. Often this is an eye-opener, for the encyclopedia often has pictures that are surprising to student (e.g., snow in the mountains of Ecuador). After they have done their report and drawn their map, they then must peruse the newspapers every day for happenings in their country. I've had parents call me and ask me how I got their youngster to finally read a newspaper - they're delighted. Sometimes, I have students do a "travel poster" about their country, inviting others to come and visit. I give them old magazines to cut up, and lots of colored markers and construction paper. During the Contra wars, there were some very creative posters about coming to see the excitement and dangers of civil war in Central America. The process is a slow one, because at first students do not want to learn anything about countries - that smack of geography. But by the end of the year, they are much more interested in it. TYING IT ALL TOGETHER: I think the best part of this exercise is at the end of the year, when during the oral and written final exam they are asked to talk about their assigned country. They can finally see why it has been necessary to do this onerous task every other Monday morning - they have really learned a lot. They also have a heightened interest in staying with the Spanish language, which is gratifying to me, also.
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John Kurilecjmk@ofcn.org