Speas Holds Linguistic Competition with School in Argentina Via Skype

This comes to us from Virginia Spaventa, who teaches Spanish at Speas Global Elementary:

“Mind Workout/Ejercicios Mentales is a linguistic competition we host annually at Speas.”  

“We compete with a bilingual school in Mar del Plata, Argentina via Skype. Second- and third- grade students were nominated by their teachers and had to try out to be the final 6 in the competition.”  

“Each team is given a topic they need to develop and are awarded points for the introduction, body, conclusion, vocabulary and, most importantly, integrity and sportsmanship.”  
“Argentina's topic was ‘Countries in Europe’ and they were asked to talk about Turkey. Speas presented ‘La Evolución de la Tecnología’ (the Evolution of Technology).”

“Each team had four judges. After much deliberating, the final score given by USA judges was 62 to 62 and 50 to 50 by the Argentine judges making it an ‘empate’ (a tie).”

“We all had a great time and made new international friends.” 

A special thanks to everyone who helped make this competition possible:  

From Speas Elementary: Mr. Ash, principal; Mr. Presley, assistant principal; Ms. Jacober, IB coordinator; Mr. Whittington, technology support;  Mrs. Arora, Ines Rapela, and Sherry Wail, judges: Mrs. Castaneda, Mrs. Benavides, and Mrs. Basurto, 2nd and 3rd grade dual-language teachers.

From Northern Hills Bilingual School in Argentina: Cecilia Silva, Head; Valeria Verna, Head of Elementary School; Nora Barrenechea, Curriculum Coordinator; Miss Marcela, third-grade teacher, and Carolina Graf, technology support. 

To the parents in both USA and Argentina, thank you for supporting your children in so many ways – creating global learners, leaders, and inquisitive minds for a united and loving world community.