Projects in Spanish I

While my school leans towards the more traditional paper/pencil tests, I try to incorporate projects for our major themes, as I think that they are extremely valuable for students on a number of levels. First, I fully get to be the "guide on the side," as opposed to the "sage on the stage," which is a philosophy that I completely agree with. Second, students often push themselves to use new words or grammatical structures in order to accomplish the task, and that is part of learning how to learn a language, and third, students consolidate and use the information that they have learned in a meaningful way. So, this year in Spanish I, we have completed the following projects:

1) Fashion show and fashion blogger to accompany our clothing unit. The students "fashion blogged" about trends and pictures that they found on the internet. I encouraged my male students to look at their favorite sports stars. A plus to this project is that students were really excited to learn adjectives such as gross, or amazing. 

2) Ideal house project (the guide and rubric are on my TPT store). Students write about and create their ideal house using house, place, and preposition vocabulary. 

3) Create a restaurant and commercial projects. The students made a commercial on healthy living and created their own restaurant. 

4) Ideal student or ideal athlete project. Students described what the ideal student or ideal athlete "has to do" in order to maintain their abilities. 

In the upcoming weeks, we will start the preterit tense, so I am contemplating having the students create a "day in the life of a ____ student" video. The narration could all be in the past tense, and my students would most certainly enjoy the excuse to use their phones at school! 

What are your favorite projects?