MS Spanish students connect with Detroit’s Hispanic community

The post-snow-day highways were treacherous, but the day’s wonderful experiences more than made up for the traffic woes when 52 students, eight parent chaperones, and two teachers visited Detroit March 13.

The trip was organized by Kevin Olson and Elaine Moffat. The first stop was Academy of the Americas, a bilingual school in Detroit, where Greenhills Spanish students read stories to first graders. Then they worked with the younger students making marcalibros, or bookmarks. The Greenhills students were impressed with the fluency of the first grade students and how much Spanish they knew.

The next stop was lunch at Mi Pueblo, an authentic Mexican restaurant near the Academy of the Americas in southwest Detroit. Students feasted on chips and salsa, tacos, tostadas, quesadillas, rice and beans and Mexican arroz con leche—rice pudding—for dessert. Needless to say, lunch was a big hit.

Finally, students visited the Diego Rivera frescoes at the Detroit Institute of Arts. They had the opportunity to sit back and take in the sheer magnificence of the frescoes, formally know as “Detroit Industry,” then complete a written exercise designed to point out the frescoes’ most important ideas, which the students had discussed earlier in their classes.

For the past several years, Spanish students at Greenhills have been actively making connections with the Latino community in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti/Detroit areas. Plans are in the works for eighth-grade and upper school students to read to elementary school students in Ypsilanti later this year and to have lunch in Ann Arbor at an authentic Hispanic restaurant.

Olson and Moffat said the students have really enjoyed working with younger students and testing out their growing Spanish skills—as well as sampling delicious food!