Like many school systems in economically stressed parts of the country, the Everett, Mass., school district had cut back on arts instruction over the years, to the point where most students were getting only a single art class per week. But since 2013, and thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, Everett has designed and…

A great start for the semester, this pinwheel project provides a good dose of art history, and a variety of media and techniques. It also teaches students how to clean up and store things properly. Five artists are introduced, each with a different art medium and technique. In this activity, students are expected to: (1) study works by five famous…

Explicit pedagogy that focuses on visual design and composition principles can affect students' responses to and understanding, interpretation and analysis of images, as well as the creation of their own visual representations. This article considers the why, the what, and the how of teaching various visual elements of art and design to students…

The blending of information from an academic class with projects from art class can do nothing but strengthen the learning power of the student. Creating three-dimensional color wheels provides the perfect opportunity to combine basic geometry knowledge with color theory. In this article, the author describes how her seventh-grade painting…

Can art be powerful enough as medium to connect two economically and culturally diverse groups of students totally unfamiliar with each other? The author put this question to the test by introducing a lesson on Madhubani, a traditional folk art from a remote region in India. The author describes how this activity gives students an opportunity to…

Many of the paintings of 20th-century American artist Philip C. Curtis defy clear classification. Curtis's artworks often show dreamlike and fantastical qualities and are therefore frequently pigeonholed as Surrealistic. While this classification is not completely erroneous, it fails to acknowledge some subtle differences between Curtis's artwork…

In this article, the author describes a landscape project using Grant Wood's paintings as an example. As part of the project, the students are required to include a barn in their picture. This project is a great opportunity to study an Iowa artist who did landscape painting and to study perspective. This is also an excellent project for teaching…

It's funny to think of the way an idea for an art lesson begins and how it has a way of changing into something completely different. That is what happened with this lesson, which was originally going to be about a springtime garden. In this article, the author describes an art lesson on collograph printmaking inspired by the poem "A Vampire's…

Making the visual arts program meaningful in public education can be a challenge when one considers how little instructional time is devoted to the visual arts. A challenge for art educators is to seek opportunities outside the classroom for real-life inquiry-based projects. This form of systematic inquiry done by teachers for themselves is called…

Manurewa Intermediate students were given an experience only the arts can provide as they collaboratively researched, responded to and celebrated a school mural project. The mural project was initiated by Shane Hansen through the Principal Iain Taylor and coordinated by Dianne Macdonald, a Professional Learning Leader at Manurewa Intermediate…

In this article, the author shares a painting unit she introduced to her students. In this unit, her students painted pictures of barns and discussed the historical significance of barns in Wisconsin.

Each year, seventh graders at Woodlawn School in Davidson, North Carolina, learn about Japan through a compilation of literature, history, and art. They are introduced to a wide range of ideas and materials: they study the Heian and Tokugawa Periods as well as modern Japan, the code of the samurai warriors, haiku and its components, and Japanese…

The seventh- and eight-grade students in the author's art program sharpened up their eyesight and their use of color charts in preparation for an op art project. Op art is short for "optical patterns and designs." The goal of the project is to create and organize line and color into shapes, patterns, and design in symmetrical and asymmetrical…

As educators of gifted students, the authors see more schools climbing aboard the differentiation wagon, and students who have been identified as cognitively gifted receiving services beyond logic worksheets. Everyone still has a long way to go, however. As classroom teachers become more familiar with characteristics of giftedness and begin to…

This Instructional Resources continues our 2004 series on forms of "public art" that included Susan Goetz Zwirn's contribution on images of work in the 1930s (March 2004), Carol Argiro's exploration of public sculpture (July 2004), and Mary Jane Zander's work on WPA post office murals (September 2004). This Instructional Resources explores an art…