In honor of National Foreign Language Week, middle and high school students expressed their love of language and culture by creating their own unique T-shirt designs. After completing their work, the students wore their T-shirts to school and participated in schoolwide design contests.
“My hope in having the students create the T-shirts was to foster teamwork and pride in the language they are studying and as a way to encourage cultural awareness and sensitivity,” Spanish teacher Millie Guzman said. “Students took a great deal of pride and incorporated cultural aspects they were proud of – like bulls as Spanish symbols of strength and flags for pride, as well as showcasing vocabulary words for others to view and learn from.”
Teachers received more than 125 entries from middle and high school students, who incorporated French, Latin and Spanish into their designs, for a variety of categories. The winners in each category – most creative/expressive of love of language, most educational, most likely to be made into an actual T-shirt, most connected to Foreign Language Week theme, most humorous, most embellished/bedazzled or extra, and best group – earned prizes and special recognition.
This year’s theme for National Foreign Language Week was “Open Your Mind to Language.”