National Foreign Language Week: Advocacy with T-shirts!

"National Foreign Language Week "March 7-13, 2016.

This year, the week of March 7 – 11 is designated as Foreign Language Week. This year's theme is "Language Enriches the Mind." We decided to celebrate it by creating T-shirts with the theme phrase on the back in Japanese, Spanish, and English, since those are the languages offered in our district. This amazing idea came from our middle school Japanese teacher, Tanya Schubert, who told me that she had it at her high school when she was a student and it really grew each year. 

We held a design contest and the middle school students submitted designs which would go on the front of the T-shirt. We then worked to get the "Language Enriches the Mind."  phrase on the back in Japanese and Spanish. 

                                                 Language Enriches the Mind

                                                 言語習得は知性を豊かにする

                                                 El lenguaje alimenta la mente 


Finally, we promoted the t-shirt sales with this form:

They sold like crazy! Who wouldn't want a $6 t-shirt!?

We all wore them today and this whole week we had various announcements and about bilinguals and language learning as a benefit to our students and society!

The shirts were made by 3 B Graphics. Check them out!
I definitely suggest doing this with your students as a fun way to spread the word on language learning, advocate, and most of all create a sense of unity and membership as a language learning community! 

Check out our photos, as well as this language poster from Middlebury!
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