Students in Ana Cristina Thomann’s Spanish II class are creating presentations about their daily routine using reflexive verbs.

“It’s for students to find a creative way to share with their classmates what a typical day looks like for them,” Thomann said. “In Spanish II, we’re using reflexive verbs which work very differently. I want students to be able to apply what we’re learning in class to real-world situations.”

For each presentation, individuals will be graded on content, verb usage and creativity.

“It’s an interesting project to work on,” sophomore Sierra Prescia said. “I never really thought about my daily routine, let alone how to write about it in Spanish, so it was difficult, but I’m very interested in seeing what other students come up with in their presentations.”

With a limited amount of verb choices that they have learned and knowledge about sentence structure, this project is meant to be challenging, but students are utilizing notes and other resources to the best of their ability.

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“The challenging thing is that you can’t really say what you want to say,” Prescia said. “In Spanish II, we’re supposedly at the second grade level in verbiage, so it really limits the words we can use.”

Thomann is focusing on reflexive verbs because they are key parts of the Spanish language that will improve the communication skills of her students, which will better prepare them for the next unit of expressing household items in Spanish.

“In Spanish, you express something that you’re doing to or for yourself everyday,” Thomann said. “For us to communicate effectively, you have to be able to use these complex structures. Verbs in Spanish can be reflexive or non-reflexive and it can get you in trouble because you can be communicating something completely different to another Spanish speaker.”

After all the presentations are complete on Friday, Thomann will have the students submit them to a discussion thread to let other classmates view them.

“I think it’ll be cool to see how all my other classmates decide to do their presentations,” sophomore Vianne Zhu said. “Thinking about it, all of these presentations are unique in some way, and that’s what I like the most about them. I know that my routine will obviously be different from my friend’s and it’ll be interesting to listen to other people’s routines.”