Proyecto de Fiestas/party project!
Project Reflection/Reflexion de Proyecto
Para este proyecto, teníamos tres opciones: Podíamos hacer comida, enseñar un baile, o enseñar una música. Elegía hacer comida. Primero, decidía hacer horchatas. Horchatas son una bebida que personas españoles se beben en muchas fiestas, incluyendo la Nochebuena. La Nochebuena es una fiesta que se celebran en el 24 de diciembre. Para mi proyecto, aprendía como hacer horchatas y memorizaba las etapas de hacerla. En la exhibición, intenté enseñar otras personas como hacer horchatas.
Mi parte favorita de este proyecto fue la presentación en exhibición. Fue difícil hablar en español, pero fue muy divertido mostrar otras personas mi trabajo. Además, me gustan exhibiciones que son interactivos como esta exhibición porque son más divertidos que otras exhibiciones. La cosa más desafío para mí era memorizar las etapas de hacer horchatas. Es difícil memorizar etapas en inglés y es más difícil memorizar etapas en español, porque no habla español con fluidez. Este desafío fue difícil, pero fue un desafío bueno para aprender español. |
Arte y literatura/Art and literature
For this project, we created two art pieces and wrote two
analyses. To start, we chose an art movement. I chose to focus on the modernist
period, which occurred during the early 1900s. The first part of the project
was to choose an art piece that fell within that movement. My art piece was
Salvador Dali’s well known “Persistence of Memory.” I wrote an analysis of the
piece and then recreated it to include elements from my life. The next part of
the project was to find a piece of literature from our time period and repeat
the process with that. Pablo Neruda’s “Walking Around” stood out to me because
of its vivid imagery and powerful language. I wrote a five paragraph analysis of
the poem (below) and created a piece of art that reflected the ideas put
forward by Neruda’s poem. The project culminated with an exhibition, in which I
chose to exhibit my second art piece.
There were many challenges with this project, but the greatest definitely came from the literary analysis that we had to write. Even in English, a literary analysis is a daunting assignment. It requires you to engage with the piece of literature and extract meaning from its often vague symbols and metaphors. Writing an analysis in Spanish made the assignment much harder. Just figuring out what the poem meant took a fair amount of time, and once that was done, I still had to write about it for five paragraphs in another language. The writing process was challenging, but I certainly learned a lot about the Spanish language through it. By spending that much time thinking and writing in Spanish, I greatly increased my understanding of Spanish grammar and vocabulary.
If I had the opportunity to redo the project or extend it further, I would want to redo my first analysis of Dali’s art. Our class ran out of time on that analysis, so it didn’t end up counting for a grade. Because of this, I didn’t get the opportunity to revise the analysis and work with it a lot like I did with the literary analysis. The writing of the literary analysis was the most valuable part of the project for me, and I would’ve gotten even more out of it if I had gone through the whole process twice. I would also have liked to be able to refine my first art piece a little more. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, but I feel that the color could’ve been refined a little more if I hadn’t had to rush it as much. Overall however, I was pretty happy with the project as a whole.
There were many challenges with this project, but the greatest definitely came from the literary analysis that we had to write. Even in English, a literary analysis is a daunting assignment. It requires you to engage with the piece of literature and extract meaning from its often vague symbols and metaphors. Writing an analysis in Spanish made the assignment much harder. Just figuring out what the poem meant took a fair amount of time, and once that was done, I still had to write about it for five paragraphs in another language. The writing process was challenging, but I certainly learned a lot about the Spanish language through it. By spending that much time thinking and writing in Spanish, I greatly increased my understanding of Spanish grammar and vocabulary.
If I had the opportunity to redo the project or extend it further, I would want to redo my first analysis of Dali’s art. Our class ran out of time on that analysis, so it didn’t end up counting for a grade. Because of this, I didn’t get the opportunity to revise the analysis and work with it a lot like I did with the literary analysis. The writing of the literary analysis was the most valuable part of the project for me, and I would’ve gotten even more out of it if I had gone through the whole process twice. I would also have liked to be able to refine my first art piece a little more. I was pretty happy with how it turned out, but I feel that the color could’ve been refined a little more if I hadn’t had to rush it as much. Overall however, I was pretty happy with the project as a whole.
Cuentos Folcloricos/Folktales
Project Reflection
For this project, we each chose a folktale from a Spanish speaking country, with a goal of learning more about the Spanish language and culture. I chose the story “El León y el Grillo,” or the Lion and the Cricket. It was a story about how a humble and clever cricket outsmarted the bullying and proud king lion. The first step was to interpret the story and find its message and moral. After that, I created a story board outlining the plot. Once finished with that, I rewrote the story so that it had the same plot and message, but with a slightly different ending. My final story was about two pages long, so it took a long time to refine it and get it ready to present. Then I created a video using background images from the story. The final step was to present this video to the class.
Overall, the process went pretty well. Personally, my favorite part was the re-writing of the story. While challenging, it provided the first real opportunity to exercise some of the Spanish skills that I’ve been working to develop all year. Also, I enjoyed trying to come up with a plot that was different enough to be unique but similar enough to be recognizable. The video, on the other hand, was much more difficult. While I didn’t have too hard of a time writing the story, reading it was a different matter. I practiced it many times, but there were inevitably some words that I could never quite pronounce correctly. Even in my final video I made several mistakes, although it was much smoother than my first reading of the story. I think that this was probably because we haven’t done a whole lot of speaking in Spanish, even though we’ve covered a lot of new topics.
If I was going to do this project again, I would like to spend a little more time on the video. I certainly put a lot of work in to the video that I made, but I with more time I could’ve made it more refined. My artistic skills are somewhat lacking, and with more time I could’ve created more refined pictures. Also, if I had made fewer pictures, I could have completed them at a higher level in the first place. Finally, I would rehearse my script more before recording. My pronunciation wasn’t too bad in this video, but it certainly could’ve been better if I’d had time to practice my story more.
For this project, we each chose a folktale from a Spanish speaking country, with a goal of learning more about the Spanish language and culture. I chose the story “El León y el Grillo,” or the Lion and the Cricket. It was a story about how a humble and clever cricket outsmarted the bullying and proud king lion. The first step was to interpret the story and find its message and moral. After that, I created a story board outlining the plot. Once finished with that, I rewrote the story so that it had the same plot and message, but with a slightly different ending. My final story was about two pages long, so it took a long time to refine it and get it ready to present. Then I created a video using background images from the story. The final step was to present this video to the class.
Overall, the process went pretty well. Personally, my favorite part was the re-writing of the story. While challenging, it provided the first real opportunity to exercise some of the Spanish skills that I’ve been working to develop all year. Also, I enjoyed trying to come up with a plot that was different enough to be unique but similar enough to be recognizable. The video, on the other hand, was much more difficult. While I didn’t have too hard of a time writing the story, reading it was a different matter. I practiced it many times, but there were inevitably some words that I could never quite pronounce correctly. Even in my final video I made several mistakes, although it was much smoother than my first reading of the story. I think that this was probably because we haven’t done a whole lot of speaking in Spanish, even though we’ve covered a lot of new topics.
If I was going to do this project again, I would like to spend a little more time on the video. I certainly put a lot of work in to the video that I made, but I with more time I could’ve made it more refined. My artistic skills are somewhat lacking, and with more time I could’ve created more refined pictures. Also, if I had made fewer pictures, I could have completed them at a higher level in the first place. Finally, I would rehearse my script more before recording. My pronunciation wasn’t too bad in this video, but it certainly could’ve been better if I’d had time to practice my story more.