5th Grade Pen Pals

7 February 2012

Today, I started the pen pal project with my 5th grade students. I have to say that I was extremely impressed and proud of the letters that they are writing!

With each class, I have shown them an example to show them more or less what I expect of them. I've allowed them to use this letter as a reference, but I've told them they can't copy the letter. Up until this point, most students are basically copying the letter but putting their own information in.

I expected this, but I've encouraged them to be creative. I've told them that if they have questions about the US (what kids eat, what they do in school, what they watch on TV, etc.) they should ask these questions in their letter.

I know that they have questions because they ask me questions ALL the time. When I read my example letter, the first question out of everyone's mouth was why I only have one last name. Then, they wanted to know if it was my father's last name or my mother's.

As I've written about earlier, Spanish people have more than one last name. Traditionally, each child gets two last names--one from his/her father and the other from his/her mother. Typically, the first last name comes from the father. For example, Federico García Lorca (though his official name is Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca) was the son of Federico García Rodríguez and Vincenta Lorca Romero. His first last name García comes from his father, and his second last name Lorca comes from his mother.

However, legally, the government can no longer dictate the order because of the gender equality law.

As I stopped to correct students' letters, I saw that a lot of them were thinking outside of the box and writing about the things that interested them. For example, one girl was writing about her family and wrote that one of her parents is Spanish but that her other parent is from another country in Europe. This is really creative considering that the kids mostly use very formulaic phrases.

A few students asked me, "How to do you say 'Voy a cumplir...?' in English?" Even though they won't learn this grammatical structure for a while, I taught them the basic form "I'm going to be..." All of them were really excited to be able to share that they will be 11 in X month.

I still haven't seen most of 6th grade's letters, but I'm hoping I'll be just as impressed.

Picture of the Day: 

Granada, Spain