Over the course of six weeks, the Millbrook IB Spanish students prepared a project called the “El Bosque Internacional” and presented it on January 27th and 28th. For the project, the students had the theme of  “Sharing the Planet”, where they split into six different groups of five or six members and picked a specific country, talking about the importance of forestries and the different ways countries take care of and preserve the planet. This interactive project involved other classes such as history, Chinese,  and other Spanish classes. The students were able to facilitate everything and made this project as realistic as possible by having a “tour guide” who was the spokesperson for the country, fake currency to “purchase” things where the students even had to do the currency conversions for their prospective country, and artifacts. Each group had a slide presentation of their country to show each group of students as they rotated through. The students learned vocabulary words and their knowledge from their extensive research to be able to present in Spanish and effectively represent their country. 

   Ms. Hernandez, the IB Spanish teacher, oversaw this project. Ms. Hernandez has been teaching IB at Millbrook for ten years. This is Mrs. Hernandez’s first year of doing this project with different countries, but her third year doing a similar project. Mrs. Hernandez had done a quinceañera project for the past two years, which is the celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday, but this year she decided to do the the topic of “Sharing the Planet ” as well as the quinceañera to cover other parts of the IB curriculum. Mrs. Hernandez likes this interactive, hands-on type of learning as she feels this type of learning is more effective for her students and allows them to retain information better. Mrs. Hernandez says, this project impacts her students by “helping them realize the advantages and importance of doing something in a different way, and it gives my students the opportunity to express themselves.” She says her favorite part of this project is watching the students be excited and proud to show off what they have learned to the other students and watching them speak Spanish. The IB students also enjoyed this project and learned many lessons from it. Senior Emily-Rose Hall, whose group chose Spain, says “My experience was overall very fun. Getting to learn about how different countries work to protect their forests and environment was an interesting experience. Senior Kiera Finessy also chose Spain and said, “I enjoyed learning different customs of Spain as well as different games and activities they would do.” She most enjoyed it when everyone came around to the tables representing different countries. Through this project, the students got to speak about their knowledge on different countries’ forests, present the different ways other countries take care of their planet, and use their knowledge to help other students learn as well.