Gina Gallo Reinhard

Gallo Reinhard’s winning project, “I Burratini: The Strings of Language, Culture and Tradition,” aims to bring language to life for students at Bristol Central High. According to Gallo Reinhard, a gifted Italian and Spanish teacher, strings are used to attach, connect and intertwine. That is why her project uses the strings of puppets to interlace competency with culture, traditions and oral proficiency. The goal of the project is to construct a puppet theater for world language students to create an alternate world in the language classroom and a world of linguistic expression and cultural awareness. Many students studying a new language are afraid to speak in front of their peers in a class setting. The theater has the potential to alleviate the fear of speaking a foreign language and to promote language use. The project will serve as a vehicle to promote vocabulary development and linguistic proficiency. Students will reenact classic Spanish and Italian stories, rewriting the narratives in authentic text for the target language. Gallo Reinhard, who lives in Bristol, hopes to be able to expand the project, creating a partnership with local elementary and preschool students in which Bristol Central students teach grammar and vocabulary through literature and storytelling.