Bobcat Stories

Could you fit your family history into a shoebox? That was the challenge students in Maria Clara Rekow’s Spanish class faced recently as they built dioramas about their ancestry. Students interviewed family members, wrote about their heritage, and created family trees whose roots reached into Europe, Africa, and, of course, across America and deep into New Mexico. The project required practicing past tense and other verb conjugations, as well as effective sentence and paragraph structure. Sophomore Sebastian explained, "I chose to do both sides of my family —  the history of slavery in Mississippi and also the hundreds of years of history that my family has had here in New Mexico. I never really knew much of my history because it's hard to find information about African American families past 1865, but I wanted to try to find a little more past that."  Luca ‘27 focused on the last time all his extended family, whose roots are in Italy,  was together and his memories of that special gathering. These dioramas are packed with each family’s life — past and present — and students agreed the project was both a wonderful personal learning experience and a satisfying way to improve their Spanish speaking and writing skills.