Arte Callejero: Interpretive Readings

7/29/2018

AP THEME: Beauty & Aesthetics/Contemporary Life
CONTEXT: Visual & Performing Arts/Lifestyles
This past year I needed a fun, engaging unit to wrap up the year with my Spanish 2 students. I was inspired by the Creative Language Classroom to teach a unit on Street/Urban art. Here are some resources that accompanied this unit at the end of the school year:

1. ¿Qué es el arte urbano?- This was a formative interpretive reading assessment we read in class to get students comfortable with some new vocabulary and introduce the new unit to them. This article came from a significantly larger article but it was modified for length to be more manageable for my Spanish 2 students.

2. ¿Cómo elegir mi nombre artístico?- After introducing the unit, working with vocabulary a little bit and looking at several examples of street art, I wanted students to have the opportunity to get a little creative. We used this article to discuss graffiti 'tags' and artistic names. I modified this article so that it would print cleaner. Sometimes formatting can mean the world of difference when it comes to being comprehensible to students! I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this article so the accompanying questions were used as a quick whole-class comprehension check and then we spent the rest of the class seeing who could come up with the most artistic tag!

3. Arte Urbano- This was the summative interpretive reading assessment that I used with my students after about two weeks of thoroughly diving into street art around the world. Although long, this assessment left students feeling successful at the end of the year because vocabulary and content were scaffolded along the way to help them comprehend. It is pivotal that the language we provide students throughout our units be comprehensible to prepare them for the tasks/assessments we want them to complete- or that they 'have to' complete.