With reading initiatives school-wide, Barbara Rice helped incorporate the theme of reading literacy into her classes by having her Spanish 2 students write and illustrate a picture book in Spanish.

The students made their picture books individually or in pairs, and had to read the books to the class aloud in Spanish. The book could be on any topic, but had to include not only the  present but the past, and preterite tense, tense the students had just learned in the previous chapter.

Madeline Strasen (’16) did her picture book on animals. “I thought it was a fun assignment, it was better than writing a paper or doing bookwork,” said Strasen. “I think [doing] a lot of writing helped [my Spanish], it helped me figure out which verb tense goes where.”

This was the first year Rice did the projects with her Spanish 2 classes, although she had done it with her French 2 classes in years prior. “I think they liked being able to use the language [in the project],” said Rice. “The most important part of learning a new language is applying the words you learn in sentences, and that is exactly what they were doing in this project.”