Term 4 Highlights: Spanish Language Fun at Rockhampton Girls Grammar School

2024 was an eventful year for Spanish at Rockhampton Girls grammar School. Term 4 was a lot of fun!

The Year 12 students left early in Term 4, completing their final exam successfully.

In Year 11, the topic of assessment was the nature of relationships and social issues around the world and affects on the Spanish speaking community. Meanwhile, they added to their bank of understanding Spanish grammar rules such as an understanding of direct and indirect nouns and pronouns in Spanish (seemingly confusing and difficult but very useful and simple when understood).

The Year 10 cohort focused on writing creative newspaper articles in Spanish using a variety of tenses and had a Spanish speaking test where they had to identify preferences for things and recount an experience in the past.

Year 9 students went over the past tense - simple and imperfect past and the difficulties of identifying when to use each one when recounting a story in the past tense (completed actions or ongoing actions).

Year 8 had fun learning about food and how to order from the menu in Spanish (and the slight differences in customs and etiquette between Latin America and Spain). Their test consisted of a role play in a Spanish restaurant - learning to order and to take an order. It was a colourful class with lots of jokes and animation while learning new vocabulary and verb tenses.

The Year 7 class learnt some important verbs in Spanish present tense, to be (the two forms), to have, and to go, to enhance their communication ability and open the gateway to the fun of learning Spanish verb conjugations and verb tenses. They also completed a research task on a Spanish speaking country - the geography, indigenous cultures, festival and cultural customs.

Across Primary School we began learning in Prep about the parts of the body, singing Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes in Spanish. The Year 1 students started to learn about clothing in Spanish, when to put on a coat, and when to use sunglasses. Year 2 students learnt basic daily routines, while the Year 3 students began learning about the animals and the planet in Spanish language.

Year 4 learnt about the establishments in a city - a zoo, library, bank etc, and briefly and successfully were able to describe what buildings were in their city in their written test.

Year 5 learnt about free time activities, what you like to do and don’t like to do (me gusta y no me gusta), while the Year 6 students added onto that understanding from last year and wrote a letter describing what they like to do on their holidays.

The students gained new Spanish language understanding across all year groups in 2024 (recommend revision over the holidays!) which will help to augment their understanding coming into the new year of learning the Spanish language at Rockhampton Girls Grammar School in 2025!

¡Vamos al año nuevo!

Emily Kuzeff

Classroom Teacher (Spanish)