By: Ryan Burkart

The APPLES festival has finally made its reappearance after a two-year absence.

There are multiple competitions within APPLES.

“They have many different kinds of events within the APPLES festival,” junior Isaiah Payne said.

Payne is a student in Spanish 6 and the winner of the overall Spanish 6 competition in APPLES, which are classified into two categories.

“They have academic and non-academic competitions such as reading, writing and speaking,” French teacher Mrs. Stephanie Grace said.

Mrs. Grace teaches all French classes past French Two.

Junior Tori Jones won first in the level four composition event for French.

“There’s four academic events and 10 to 15 art events,” Jones said

Besides the art events such as dancing, plays and music, there isn’t much preparation.

“It’s just like classwork and it’s voluntary,” Grace said.

However, there is practice for the dancing, plays and music but it is practiced outside of the class on the student’s own time.

“There are art recreations, songs, dances and home readings,” Jones said.   `

Spanish teacher Mrs. Tammy Lyons, who is the Chairman of the World Language Department, teaches her students by having the students speak only Spanish.

“We use simulated immersion to teach our students,” Mrs. Lyons said.

Simulated immersion is the practice of learning a language by only having conversations in that language.

Both languages use simulated immersion at all levels of French and Spanish.

In early levels of French, they take tests but in higher levels, she assigns out more projects.

“In levels three through six I like giving larger projects that combine reading, writing, speaking and listening such as song analysis projects or music-based cultural items,” Mrs. Grace said.

Spanish class is not the same and the students are graded on different things.

“Most grades are based on class participation, but there are various assessments graded like vocabulary and writing compositions,” Payne said.” They are graded for grammar correctness or just completion.”

Lyons believes that this year’s festival was very successful and had a wonderful turnout.

“I feel like we won more awards than we ever have before,” Lyons said. “I also feel like the participation for all the levels of languages was very strong, so we were able to win awards in all of the levels. Overall, I think the festival was amazing and we can’t wait to present the acts at Culture Day on May 11^th.”