By Tanisha Gunby ’21 and Laura Kors ’21

Spanish II  students competed for a pizza party during their third unit assessment.
At the end of each unit, students create a presentation to practice interpretation, conversation and presentational skills in Spanish. In the “La vida cotidiana,” (Daily life) unit, students learned words that relate to houses and neighborhoods. Their assignment was to film a video of people buying and selling a house.
Spanish II teacher and World Languages department head Edgar Jurado said that the goal of this project was to motivate students to push themselves, be rewarded for their hard work and create a fun experience while practicing their Spanish. The Spanish II teachers said that they enjoyed the results and hope to do the project again in the future.
“I was very proud of the work they turned in because the movies, I think, were a cut above the norm… they really did put in a lot of extra effort and it was obvious. So I was really grateful for that… I was really proud of them,” Jurado said.
The Spanish II teachers took input from their students to choose some of their classes’ best videos. Then the Spanish II students voted for a video from this smaller selection of videos created by all classes. They voted for the video with the best content, best moviemaking technique and the one that they enjoyed watching the most. One video was chosen in each category and won a pizza party for their class. The winning classes were Jeannette Rodriguez’s seventh and eighth period classes and Spanish II teacher Anamaria Ayala’s eighth period class.
Students said that they enjoyed sharing their work with classmates and seeing what their peers created.
“Winning the Spanish video [contest] is a great honor because we put a lot of work into that project, and it was nice to see our work pay off and be recognized by our peers,” Landon Poon ’20 said.