Span 310: Hispanic Children Literature
Introduces Hispanic children's literature using fairy tales, poetry, essays, and drama. Presents the elements of children's narrative: characterization, setting, narrative structure and pictures, and drawings. Students practice working these basic elements in individual and collaborative group writing and reading exercises. Includes brief, written analytic responses.
This class was taught by Dr. Maria Zielina. We read and analyzed various Hispanic children's books, stories, and poems. We also discussed the effectiveness of certain styles used by the various authors for their intended age group audience. We also did several group projects, including making an alphabet book in which each of us chose a letter and an object whose spanish name began with that letter, then made an illustration of the object and included some information that we thought would be interesting to a child. We also did a group play at the end of the semester, telling a literary story through acting (in our case a puppet show). We also had quizzes and tests, one of them being on the book "El Son de África," which I found to be a very enjoyable read. We also went over a few of the same themes that we did in Span 304, such as analyzing poetry, the characteristics of the various Latin American literary movements. We also learned about the differences between fables, myths, and legends. This class was definitely different than any other I have taken, but it was entertaining and useful. This class satisfies MLO 2: Language and Linguistic Knowledge, and MLO 3: Literary and Cultural Knowledge.