El Tur de Fay

Bienvenidos a Fay! Sixth graders create video tours of campus in Spanish.

The final project of the winter term for sixth-grade Spanish students was to create a video that depicted a prospective student touring the school. Students were challenged to incorporate the vocabulary and grammar topics that they had learned so far this year. Working in small groups of three or four, each group decided which spaces on campus the characters in their video would “tour” and then each student worked independently to write two scenes for their group’s video. Once the scripts were written, students cast themselves as the different characters in the video and used the iMovie app to film, edit, and add special effects to their video. “At least two-thirds of the students had not used iMovie before, so this was a great opportunity for them to work together and learn from one another,” says World Language Department Chair and sixth grade Spanish teacher Kara Mertz. It was also a great chance for the sixth graders, as the leaders of the Lower School community, to exercise both the responsibility and independence that the project entailed. “It was really important that they used their class time well on this project,” says Kara. “They could leave the classroom space and go anywhere on campus to film as long as they checked in and out and I gave them a lot of trust.”

The video was a creative assessment of the work that sixth graders had done in Spanish so far that term. Each student was graded on the individual scenes that they wrote, the grammar and vocabulary that they used, as well as their pronunciation in the scenes that they acted in. “The project is really comprehensive and it allows them to be creative within a structure while also reinforcing what they have learned,” says Kara. It was also a good exercise in empathy. “These students were all new to Fay at one point and a lot of the conversation that they wrote into the dialogue was really authentic,” says Kara. To view a clip from one of the videos click here.

Back

News Detail

El Tur de Fay