MMA Cadets Celebrate La Tomatina Festival in Spanish Class

La Tomatina is a "food" festival that occurs in Buñol, Spain each year in August. Our Spanish I and II classes waited until early October to celebrate since the festival was a portion of a recent chapter. Click here to view more photos.

During the real festival, dumpster trucks deliver large loads of the red fruit, and the attendees are allowed an hour to play with their food before the fire trucks come to clean the city. In our La Tomatina festival at MMA, the cadets were not allowed to toss tomatoes at each other, so a substitution of water balloons was made.

We practiced hitting the correct target related to the conjugation of the Spanish verb provided by the teacher and worked on listening skills with commands in the target language.

The next station allowed the cadets to create abstract art by launching red paint at poster boards that had the festival name spelled out (although not pictured here, all of the posters were painted by the last class of the day). 

Finally, we cleaned up by using the remaining water balloons to stage a "tomato fight." The cadets had a grand time chasing each other and their teachers with water balloons, and they learned to appreciate the culture of a Spanish-speaking country in a more meaningful manner than simply reading a text or watching a video online.    

— Joshua Allison, Spanish Instructor