Una Visita al Museo de Arte

I teach art vocabulary to Spanish II students.  Honestly, there is a lot more I could do with this unit and I am working on adding in more culture.  However, one of the days that we work with these vocabulary words is a day that I am proud of: the art museum visit.

I bring in little objects that I have picked up in my travels/received as gifts and place them around the room so they can double as sculptures for the day.  I tape mini-prints of works by Picasso and Dalí around the room along with transparencies of other paintings (the only time I use transparencies the whole year since I no longer have an overhead projector).  I dig out a larger, rolled up poster of Acapulco and stick it to my bulletin board to pretend that it is a mural.  Voila!  I have transformed my room into an art museum for a day.

a sculpture (from Colombia)

I created a sign with a name for our museum for the first time this year: El Museo de Arte del Rey Felipe VI.  I liked naming the museum but want a better sign for next year; I might even put it on the door to the room instead of just the whiteboard in front.  Also for next year I want to give students entrance tickets the day before.  For homework they will be expected to write a sentence that uses art vocabulary on the back and then must hand the ticket to me to enter the room.

This year I put on my docent voice to explain the assignment and made sure to remind them that flash photography was not permitted.  (Apparently I did a really good impersonation since one boy told me I might have missed my true career calling.)  Each student was advised to pick up a museum guide which was really a list of their vocabulary since carrying computers around to reference their notes would have become awkward.

At this point the students moved around the classroom/museum at their own pace to look at the artwork and respond.  For each piece they had to write three sentences: what type of art they saw (painting, portrait, sculpture, etc), a description (it was traditional for example), and their reaction (I liked it/loved it, etc).  I definitely want to work on having a greater variety of artwork next year although I think everyone knew the word for painting by the end of the period!  (It doesn't help that this year I left my personal collection at home--just too tired with musical rehearsals I guess!)

Students get a small classwork grade for the assignment.  I look for adjective agreement, spelling, and overall sentence structure but I don't take off a lot of points for mistakes especially if they are repeated.  I also look for variety in adjectives used.  I do have a minimum number of artworks that I expect students to have seen but since I let them work at their own pace, this number is not really high and I don't tell them what it is.  I would rather have students reflecting on the artwork and writing well than rushing to hit a magic number.