Febrero Spanish

How to stretch a single lesson into hundreds of interesting activities.

Caroline Cercone, a Nashville potter and Abintra mother, collaborated with Lower Elementary students on a recent tile project that depicted a story in Spanish.  Each student prepared a sentence in Spanish with an illustration, which they transferred on a clay tile using sgraffito: a technique scratching directly into clay or through a layer of slip with a pointy tool. They learned about the American studio potter Jan Edwards who loves to travel  and draw.  She uses her travel sketches as the beginning of her work  when drawing on pots and tiles using sgraffito. What a wonderful journey for all of us!

Middle Elementary and some Lower Elementary students are knitting beautiful items. They all look forward to the last minutes of Spanish class to listen to music or our Spanish novels while they knit or weave.  One of the projects is to knit squares to make blankets that will be donated to a nursing home.

Upper Elementary students are working on three musical plays:  “El Banco” (The Bank)  “Puedo ir al baño? ”(Can I go to the bathroom?) and “Soy guapo” (I’m handsome). These plays are perfect for learning about conjugation of the past tense.

I was very impressed to see the stories that Upper Elementary wrote in Spanish. The stories were very well written.

Lower Elementary and Middle Elementary students worked on six stories in which they practiced vocabulary, listening, translating, understanding, answering questions, adding details, personalizing their stories, sequencing the story, writing, reading, and acting out the play!