Middle School Advanced
This trimester students in Español Avanzado Middle School have worked with two main books: El día en que descubres quién eres by Jacqueline Woodson and La Casa en Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. The first text guided our discussions about many elements that define a person’s identity. We started by reflecting on the importance of a name and naming practices. Students had the opportunity to reflect on their own names, their history, and its importance to them. Subsequently, they created acrostic poems with their first names. In these they had to include something related to the provenance of their name, and original simile, and some of their personality traits. Afterwards, each student created a digital tryptic using the technique of collage to represent their poems. We then continued our exploration of the self by identifying a moment when we had discovered something about ourselves. Woodson’s book presents us with several characters, all children, that feel uncomfortable about who they are and about what they have accomplished so far. It is not until they discover something within themselves that they start to accept and love themselves. Hence, students wrote short stories of a moment in their lives when they had felt that sense of discovery and achievement. The book’s imagery guided our last project connected to this book. Exercising close-looking, readers can identify, within the objects in the story, many rulers. In class, we took time to observe and identify these rulers and their placement within the story. We then reflected about their presence and concluded that these could represent how we measure ourselves against others, but also against our present and past selves. Students then went on to create a visual project in which they selected an object that would represent their own “ruler”. Within that main drawing, they included images to represent three specific things: something they haven’t accomplished yet, something they are currently working on, and something they have already accomplished.
During the last third of the trimester we continued our focus on identity through the lens of Sandra Cisneros’ La Casa en Mango Street. This book allowed us to broaden our notion of the self, to include the ideas that others might have of us, and how that informs who we are. In addition to several of the book’s vignettes, we have complemented our rich discussions with several works of art. This unit has been inspired and guided by the curriculum created by the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. In our final project of the trimester, after discussions about the meaning of stereotypes and assumptions, and contextual examples, students went on to create their own “identity box”. These small cardboard boxes represent a student’s exterior (what people see of them, assumptions, and stereotypes) and their interior (who they truly are and is not visible to the eye). To accompany their creative expression projects, students wrote artist statements, which describe, analyze, and connect their work to La Casa en Mango Street.
High School Advanced 1
Students in Advanced 1 Spanish spent the first trimester learning about the history of Spain, with a concentration on the Civil War and the years that followed. Students discussed how a nation’s identity, or lack thereof, can throw a country into tumult and explored the question of how the Franco dictatorship impacted the daily lives of people, especially those in more rural areas. For their first project, students analyzed and then illustrated the poem “La guitarra” by Federico Garcia Lorca, which ties together themes of cultural and national identity through the metaphor of the flamenco guitar. Later, while learning about the destruction caused by the Civil War, students read Vicente Aleixandre’s poem, “Oda a los niños de Madrid muertos por la metralla” and compared it to Picasso’s famous work “Guernica”. Students produced a creative expression project while reading La hija del sastre, a short novel about the daughter of an ex-Republican official living under the harsh restrictions of Franquismo. To complement our discussions about the dictatorship, we watched Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno, for which students wrote a critical movie review that examined its historical accuracy. Finally, students compared the symbols and themes of the movie to Ana María Matute’s short story “El árbol de oro,” for which they also wrote a brief creative piece. Linguistically, students continued to practice grammatical structures and verb tenses learned in previous years, and furthered their study of the subjunctive mood by reviewing the present tense and beginning to recognize and use the past tense.
High School Advanced 2
This trimester Español Avanzado 2 focused on reading and creating with poems. What started as an ambitious desire to read as many as fifteen poems, ended up with rich and deep explorations of three main poems, and the additional reading of five others. We spent the bulk of our time with two poems: Soneto XXIII by Spanish Renaissance poet Garcilaso de la Vega and “Mientras por competir con tu cabello” by Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora. The reading and analysis of these two poems allowed the students to learn about the inner workings and specificities of a sonnet. It also exposed them to literary themes, such as Descriptio Puellae (description of a youth), Carpe Diem (seize the day), Donna Angelicata (angelical woman), Tempus fugit (time flies), among others. It pushed them to identify a wide array of figures of speech (metaphor, personification, hyperbole, anaphora, alliteration, enjambment, etc.) within the poems. Lastly, it presented them with concrete examples in which they could observe the characteristics of both the literary and the artistic movements: the Renaissance and the Baroque. For their first project, students explored the main theme in Soneto XXXIII, “a call for the enjoyment of youth”, by writing either an opinion essay or an original sonnet. After reading Góngora’s poem, and being exposed to the Baroque, they went on to write a formal art analysis for a painting of their choosing from either of these two time periods. They then created visual representations for both poems, while incorporating traits of each artistic movement in their pieces. After much time spent on these two poems, students chose one of five new poems to write a traditional commentary. This project challenged them, while encouraging them to refer back to the close reading, research, and analysis techniques used with previous poems. For their commentary, both students chose the poem “Lo fatal” by Nicaraguan Modernist poet Rubén Darío.