Trip planning - Goal +Reflection

Spanish 1 has spent the last 3 weeks planning a trip to a Spanish speaking country in Central/South America. We wanted to think of warmer climates while it was freezing outside! They had to research the country they chose, find activities, hotels, means of transportation to and around that place, and share some advice with us. Since they only had $2,000 to spend for 6 days, they kept track of all expenses on a spreadsheet. The other trick was that they had to present in Spanish, which I know is a crazy thought considering they are in Spanish class! :)
Each section created a list of words and phrases they thought would be useful for their presentations and we worked together to learn them in Spanish. Each section also created the rubric that would be used for grading. Once we were done with those 2 things, they dove into their work. We spent time almost every day working on different speaking activities to get ready for their presentations.
They were really frustrated at first that I didn't spend every second of our time together telling them how to say everything they wanted.
Overall, I was happy with the end products. Majority of the students really did work hard and had excellent presentations!


If I did this again in the future, I would definitely make sure to do some of the elements together as a class rather than individually when they reached that point. Example, some students did not know how to use Excell to keep track of their expenses. I would also have given them more opportunities to use online/book dictionaries in class so that I wasn't tied up helping with one word. Most of my students have used these at some point this year, but I still had few that needed help.
I did have a few students that tried to use an online translator to do their entire project even after I had told them not to (amazing, I know). I explained that it can be spotted right away, and when those people presented the entire class knew it too. I plan to use this sort of thing as a "teachable moment" and do different examples of things translated on one of those sites and comparing it to what is being asked of them. I want them to be able to spot the difference and be able to modify what they would like to say so that it can be done on their own rather than look something up word for word.