I apologize that it's been a while since I have posted here in our blog. This will be a longer post as I have a lot to update you on - we have been very busy in Spanish class! At the end of October we spent some time learning about the celebration of Día de los Muertos. This is a very special and important holiday that is celebrated by families in Mexico. Día de los Muertos translates to Day of the Dead in English and takes place on November 1st and 2nd.
Sometimes this holiday gets confused with Halloween because it is celebrated around the same time of year. However, Día de los Muertos is very different from the Halloween holiday. Mainly because it is NOT a scary holiday at all. Day of the Dead is filled with love, happiness, light, laughter, color, and music, and is all about family. Families in Mexico take time to remember and their ancestors who have died and celebrate their memory. They create ofrendas in their homes and decorate them with orange marigold flowers, candles, food, and pictures of their loved ones. It is an incredibly beautiful holiday filled wth family and love. We started by doing a reading comprehension activity where students identified some important facts and also compared Día de los Muertos to Halloween. In our discussions about the holiday, we also talked about the movie Coco, which many of the students have seen. We also watched a short video that was made by the creators of the film. It followed them on the research trips they took to Mexico before making the movie in order to learn more about the people and culture. The video gave some fascinating insight into the life of families in Mexico and their celebration of Día de los Muertos. If you haven't seen it yet, the movie Coco is one I would highly recommend as an accurate portrayal of Mexico and its culture. It does a FANTASTIC job representing Mexican families, what this holiday means to them, and how they celebrate. We then started working on our first round of Centers for the year. Centers are our final activity of the unit that allow students to demonstrate their understanding of and ability to use the vocabulary we've learned in. There are a total of four Center activities for students to complete; one involves demonstrating understanding by reading a passage and finding/identifying information, the second involves communicating with someone orally by asking and answering questions, the third involves using vocabulary to write either a letter, and the fourth is a Día de los Muertos craft. The three language-based activities focus on the goals of our Identity Unit:
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July 2020
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