Why Learn Languages? Engaging, Connecting and Sharing With Zines
My students need materials to make and share zines: a book to explore and inspire, lots of markers, cardstock, draft markup pencils, long reach stapler, and a tote to organize and transport our zines to ZineFest.
$248 goal
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Hooray! This project is fully funded
Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
I teach Spanish at a project-based school in downtown San Diego. Our students learn by engaging in authentic and meaningful challenges, and by sharing what they do with the community - both here in our school, in our city, and through international connections!
My goal is to engage and empower my students so that every single one of them can learn, grow, and connect.
As a language teacher, I want to teach them to both value language and to use it, especially as a vehicle for connecting to their community.
My Project
Learning new languages is important, but it can be a big challenge! While young children can soak up language like sponges, adolescents and adults need to have a reason to take on this challenge. I teach middle school Spanish to a diverse group of students - from beginners who have no connection or experience with the language, to native speakers who use it in their daily lives and relationships. Before I can teach students the WHAT of languages, we need buy in by exploring the WHY. We will begin our year by exploring reasons to learn new languages, along with our identities and strengths in order to find out HOW we learn best as individuals and as a group.
Zines - small, self-published magazines - are a way to creatively express ourselves and share information, and they are accessible to everyone regardless of their creative experience or language level!
To begin our year, we'll talk about reasons to learn new languages, and we'll create zines about why languages are important. These zines might be a variety of things: Comics about situations where knowing a new language could be helpful, personal stories about people we care about who we connect to in more than one language, facts and information about how new language helps our brains, and beyond. We will share our zines with the school community and at the San Diego Zine Fest, to give students a real-world, authentic audience (and maybe the spark to keep creating and sharing on their own. By using the open-ended and creative format of zines, I hope to connect and engage all of my students, and empower them to share their stories with the world, while deepening their understanding of why learning languages is so important. I can't wait to see what they create!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Kennedy and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
