As a project in Spanish 4, students are recreating scenes from the book “Don Quijote.” Students had a few weeks in class to work on creating the videos complete with narration and speaking. 

The two classes split into groups of five to six students and each was assigned a character or two. Senior Rensia Narios is in a group with five other peers. Narios said, “It was difficult at first because we weren’t sure who wanted to play who from the book, but eventually we compromised and just rolled with whoever we got.” 

The students translated the book into English to better understand it and wrote their scripts based on each chapter of the book. “The project actually did help me understand more of the text because when acting it out. It gave me and my group time to reread or look over the image and text to understand more what was happening, which really helped,” Narios said. Her favorite scene is where “Sancho reunited with his Donkey because he lost him.” 

Senior Beverly Dodson’s group chose the characters they wanted to portray. “Mallory volunteered to be Don Quijote and Alicia volunteered to be the narrator. Since Sancho is a short, fat man, we decided to cast Reagan as him ironically as she is neither of those. This left Jas and me to play the side character parts,” Dodson said. 

The group was chosen based on Dodson’s friendships with her classmates. “I think it was a good book, despite me missing a few days of reading. My favorite chapter is the one where Sancho gets tossed in a blanket because Don Quijote didn’t pay the innkeeper. It’s my favorite because it’s so random,” Dodson said. 

Spanish teacher Dan Vargason assigns this project to help students “get a deeper understanding of the book when they have to narrate it and act out the scenes.” The only change this year due to COVID-19 is that students are to wear masks when they are in their groups. “We have the students read and act out Don Quijote, so they can take it from reading it to bringing it to life.”