During our last trimester of Avanzado MS, we read La ciudad de las bestias. This was a challenging, yet rewarding experience! With 401 pages it was the longest book we read this year. This first installment to Isabel Allende’s YA trilogy, gave students the opportunity to further explore their creativity, while learning about the Amazon forest, and understanding some of the threats that it faces. Students completed three projects, two creative expression projects and one research project.
After discovering that the search for “la bestia'' is the reason why the main character, Alexander Cold, embarks on a journey to the Amazon with his unordinary grandmother Kate, students also learned about legends of other fantastical creatures said to inhabit the rainforest. Afterwards, they conceived and wrote legends about their own original beasts, and created string puppets to bring them to life.
Throughout the book Alex and his newfound friend, Nadia Santos, are intrinsically connected to specific animals. These “animals of power”, which live within them, come to their aid in times of need, and provide them with strength and courage. For their second project students reflected and chose an animal that they identify with in a similar way. They wrote poems that represent the traits of their creatures, and their connection with them. They illustrated their printed poems with a hand drawn page border that incorporates elements from the text. After finishing the book and learning more about how humans are destroying this unique ecosystem, students researched and created public service announcements to educate a broader community about the benefits of the rainforest, what is causing the destruction of the rainforest, and ways to save it!
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During third trimester, students in Advanced 1 Spanish covered topics ranging from environmental issues, to the Cuban Revolution, to music and dance, and even to extraterrestrial invasions! We began the trimester by finishing up the book series we had been reading all year with the novel Las Sombras by AC Quintero, which inspired us to create a board game in a style very similar to Hasbro’s Clue. Next, students tackled Luis Sepúlveda’s novel La historia de una gaviota y el gato que le enseñó a volar while also independently researching a current environmental issue important to them and promoting awareness of the issues on Meridian’s Instagram account. This unit culminated in an entirely student-produced puppet show inspired by Sepúlveda’s book and performed for the Meridian community. Our next unit centered on 20th century Cuba, forcing us to consider the complexities of the island’s history and its impact on Cuban life today. Students read a short novel about a family politically divided, recorded monologues as fictitious characters living through the Revolution, and completed essays that encouraged them to think critically about two controversial figures, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Finally, having been inspired by our weekly “Baile viernes” activity, students ended the trimester by choreographing and recording an original dance! Please enjoy scrolling through the final products of their hard work, critical thinking, creativity, sense of humor, and of course, burgeoning language skills!
Our last trimester in Español Avanzado 2 merged poetry and narrative, the two literary genres that we worked on during our first and second trimesters. Our work was grounded on the novel in verse PoetX written by Dominican American slam poet and novelist Elizabeth Acevedo. In this book we follow Xiomara, a young woman of Dominican descent, who lives with her family in New York city. A poet herself, Xiomara struggles to fit in at home, with her very religious mother, and at school, where she is often reduced to being a “girl with a curvaceous body”. This book is all about her journey of self discovery and acceptance, through the power of her words.
Like Xiomara, the two students in A2 had the opportunity to learn about themselves through words and imagery. Throughout the whole term they worked on creating their very own anthology of poems. They created everything for their book! From designing and illustrating their book’s dust jacket, to writing and editing between 10 and 21 original poems, inspired by Acevedo’s story, to creating the book itself, with the aid of a self-publishing website. They did it all!
They also had the opportunity to experience their poems and their growth as Spanish speakers and artists through multiple outlets. In addition to creating their books, they presented their work to a real audience, during our very own Poetry Slam. One of the students, also created illustrations connected to each of her poems and a “poetry short film” where she engaged, in yet another way, with her work.