From March 4 to March 8, World Language Week is celebrated nationally and at VHHS. Every year, the celebration adopts a different theme. This year, World Language Week’s theme was to promote friendship through language.
Throughout the week, VHHS held activities to help broaden cultural knowledge, such as highlighting trivia about different world cultures on the daily bulletin. The hallway speakers also blasted music in a multitude of languages during passing periods.
On Friday, March 8, VHHS celebrated the last day of World Language Week by hosting the World Languages Showcase in the LMC during all class periods. According to French teacher Kristina Hauptmann, this was the second time this showcase ran at VHHS.
Two years ago, Hauptmann implemented the showcase project into the school’s curriculum, after observing it being done at her previous job in another district. Currently, the showcase serves as a Capstone-level project for students enrolled in AP Spanish, AP French, AP German, and German IV Honors.
Students in these advanced classes worked for five weeks on the project. It started with research about a student’s topic of interest, then they used that information to create a written paper and an oral presentation for their classroom in the target language.
Afterwards, language teachers chose some students to exhibit their projects at the showcase again based on which were most engaging to the audience and had the most depth.
The showcase displayed projects on the history of different cultures, as well as cultural games and traditions. Hands-on activities also took place, such as breaking open piñatas. Diverse food samples were also offered.
The Spanish language students presented topics such as the history behind national Mexican flowers, Mexican embroidery, the Ecuadorian celebration of Día de Los Defuntos, “Lucha Libre,” Indigenous South American board games, and bull running.
Visitors were invited to play the South American board game Patolli, decorate Ecuadorian “bread babies” from the Día de Los Defuntos celebration, play a bull running game, and attempt to order food in Spanish in a Spanish street market mock-up.
Additionally, many projects offered food tastings, such as varied South American homemade sauces, coffee, Aztec “Xocolatl” – a chocolate drink, and fruits such as pineapple seasoned with Tajín, a Mexican spice.
AP Spanish student, Michael Olson (11), worked on the South American sauces stand. He shared what it was like to make the sauces from scratch for the showcase.
“[Making Chimichurri and Pebre] was a little difficult, because it wasn’t fun peeling the leaves off all the cilantro and parsley,” Olson said. “Then I had to crush twenty cloves of garlic for each of them…it was [a lot of] labor.”
The French presentations focused on topics such as Formula One, the story of Beauty and the Beast, French fashion, a biography on the French ballerina and WW2 spy Josephine Baker, and Parisian Catacombs.
Visitors were able to play with remote control cars, design their own dresses, and walk through a Catacomb recreated in the LMC.
On the other hand, the German language presentation had topics such as German auto-motives, a German language enrichment program, and a simulation of ordering food from a market in German.
AP German student, Rhea Narasimhan (12), showcased information about Concordia Language Villages, a language-learning summer camp in Minnesota, sponsored by Concordia University.
Narasimham attended the German language camp for more than two weeks last summer after winning a scholarship through a class opportunity. She stated that being immersed in the culture and surrounded by people learning the same language as her was a great time — the best summer of her life.
“My German got a lot better,” Narasimham said. “ I [still] keep my name tag on my nightstand. It’s my prized possession — and I’m still friends with all the people from camp.”
To Hauptmann, hosting this celebration at VHHS is essential to bring to light the cultural diversity at VHHS, since 32 languages are spoken by students at home, and to make different people in our school community aware of the richness of language and cultures.
“Honoring, respecting and celebrating how diverse our population is at Vernon Hills is really important. Also, recognizing that a language is not just the language, but whole groups of people, culture and thousands of years of history [is important],” Hauptmann said. “We try to inspire our students to understand the depth of and to appreciate all cultures.”
