La casa ideal de ... (Novice High - MS)
For the first project this trimester, students of the Novice High middle-school class were given the following task:
“You are a multimillionaire architect looking to build their dream house. Money is not an object. In this project you will design a house, label it, furnish it, and then describe your house in Spanish.”
In order to achieve the task of creating their “ideal house”, students started by making a list of house-related words, which they studied in their weekly vocabulary test and later used them to label the different rooms, furniture and floor of their homes.
They then drafted their vision for the house, depicting an areal view of the floor-plan for their home. This process was an opportunity for students to see what worked (two floors, staircases and libraries) and what didn’t (15 floors, 30 rooms and jacuzzis bigger than the entire home). Indeed, each student was assigned a partner to review each other’s draft and make sure their work fulfilled all of the necessary requirements. Once the draft had been triple checked, students moved on to their posters.
Finally, once their posters were completed, students wrote a twenty-sentence paragraph about their ideal house to including details such as where the house was located, who lived in the home and which was their favorite room. Once their paragraph had gone through several rounds of feedback and revisions, students presented their “Casas Ideales” to the rest of the class, from memory, and using their floor-plans to help illustrate their words.