Spanish 111

Spanish 111

I took Spanish 111 in my fall semester in 2018. I was a little nervous going into this class as it was my first Spanish class since my sophomore year in high school. However, as a 100 level class and an introduction to Spanish class, it was not difficult. Throughout the course I realized that I remembered many of the concepts and the course served mainly as a review. However, I learned more vocabulary and gained a better understanding of the grammar.

In Spanish 111, we were always encouraged to speak in Spanish and when we did not know the correct word, we were expected to ask how to say it in Spanish instead of speaking in English. We also did many activities in class with the goal of getting the students to become more comfortable with speaking in Spanish. Because I remembered most of what was taught in this class from previous classes, I was able to focus more on the activities instead of learning the material. Due to this, I was also ablate help some of my classmates during activities.

Every class we had numerous partner activities. These ranged from having a conversation to doing a worksheet or game to pretending we were in a club and having to introduce ourselves and talk to each other in Spanish. The main project we had in Spanish 111 was to work with a partner to create a presentation about a holiday or celebration in a Spanish speaking country. My partner and I chose to do a presentation on La Tomatina in Spain, a celebration that is essentially a giant food fight with tomatoes. This project pushed me out of my comfort zone as we not only had to create an entire presentation in Spanish, we had to speak in front of the class for five minutes in Spanish, which is something that I have never had to do.

One of the individual projects in this class was to create a brochure of an area in Spain, which is attached below. While most chose Madrid or another major and well-known area in Spain, I chose Zarazoga because I had never heard of the area before. While it was a little more difficult to research Zarazoga than an area like Madrid, I learned a lot about this area and was able to share my research with others in the class.

I enjoyed this class as it was filled with new and fun activities every class period. Throughout the semester, I became more confident with speaking in Spanish, especially without having many materials in front of me. While during most of the activities, we were able to have out textbooks out, I was not constantly looking in the book and taking time to write out and plan what I would say. Instead, I focused on forming sentences with what I already knew. This showed me that I knew more than I previously thought and that what I was saying did not always have to be perfect in order to get my point across.