Results of Community Based Team Projects
What?
The
team project that we chose to do was to plan, promote,
and carry out a Spanish-language booth at a community literary event
called Read Across America at Lincoln
Square Mall in Urbana, Illinois. We had three group members who divided the work amongst themselves early in the semester to carry out the project in the most efficient manner possible. The event allowed us to provide a service to the people
of Champaign-Urbana.
Our work in the community throughout
this semester with Spanish 332 has
shown us the number of
Spanish speaking individuals in our community.Before the event, we worked to promote our booth by creating a one page flyer that presented our booth in a
fun, yet informative way. We then
reached out to our community partners, giving out flyers to those we worked with
in the schools we volunteer at, as well as other SPAN 332 students and our
professor to try and get our flyer out in the community.Regretfully, this part
could have been executed earlier, however, to reach a larger amount of people instead of all happening the week of
the event. In addition to the promotion,
we went out in the community to secure spanish and english books that related to
our booth theme by borrowing books from the Center for Children’s
Books at the University of Illinois
and the Champaign Public Library.
Read Across America allowed us to set up a bilingual (Spanish and English) booth
so that children and their parents in our community could spend time reading books and doing activities in English and
Spanish. We provided
books and supplies so that children and their families were able to read and do
activities in the language of their choice. The activities were chosen to
account for differences in age. Thus, we created spanish word searches,
coloring pages with Spanish captions underneath, and a wide array of
multicolored storytelling material. The story telling material incorporated farm animals as well as different habitats and things they
could interact with such as a feeding station and car, all with Spanish and
English captions underneath. We encouraged older kids to invent stories about
the animals and to tell them to us in Spanish. When not working on activities
with children, we were reading to them in
Spanish which was a good means of
practice for all of us.
We were able to see families spending time together and learning together. There were families who spoke no Spanish at all who were
interested in having our group read them
books in Spanish. In other cases, Spanish-speaking families were able to enjoy their favorite children’s books together. Our booth
was very popular at the event and we accredit it to the great
service that we provided the community.
So what?
We were aware of
the large number of Spanish speakers in
the community and that an event where they could share their language with their
children would be very popular and needed. Many immigrants come to the country with young children who end up
being bilingual or end up losing very much
language ability from the country of
their birth or their parents’ birth. Often, reading and speaking in
another language can be embarrassing or not preferred
by that child and so an event like this can really help enforce the idea that
speaking Spanish is a great asset to have and encourages them to participate. Additionally, we felt that showing
non-Spanish speakers in the community the importance of bilingualism would
help them to be more understanding of the Spanish speaking community.
At
the Read Across America event, we offered Spanish-speaking, monolingual children a way to actively participate
in the event, as well as gave children in bilingual educational programs an opportunity to practice their Spanish. The
Champaign-Urbana
area has a large Spanish-speaking population and, while the children in monolingual homes may be
learning English at school, some
children only knew Spanish. Our booth made
those children feel more comfortable
and willing to participate in the activities. Many of the parents we spoke to
also told us that their children were in a special bilingual program where half of their children’s classes were in English and the
other half were in Spanish. They were very appreciative that
our booth had books and activities in both Spanish and English so that
their children could get more practice with Spanish.
Now what?
At
the event, we also made the Champaign-Urbana community more aware of our Spanish 332 Business and
Entrepreneurship class at the University of Illinois. Many parents asked what
organization we were with and this gave us the chance to explain the importance and value of our class. Throughout the
event we really utilized our interpersonal communication and leadership skills to interact with both the parents and
children. The ability to effectively communicate and demonstrate leadership are skills that the three of
us will need in our futures. Our experience with planning and organizing a booth
is also one that the three of us can benefit from as well. Hopefully this event encourages many more
like it to take place. The growing Spanish-speaking community in the Champaign-Urbana area as well as the rest of the United States is an
indication of the immense need for literacy among Spanish speakers to encourage participation among young students as well as promote advanced written and spoken language fluency as
they grow older. In the future, we hope that more events like this can take place to promote awareness and bring up the discussion of Spanish speaker culture
and identity to the rest of the United States.
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