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Ceramics: A Vessel into History
Students create a ceramic vessel, discuss their artistic choices, and identify elements derived from historical examples. In this ceramics instructional activity, students identify symbols and imagery that are connected to...
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Temperature Stories
Young scholars create a story that matches the provided temperature data. They use graphed temperatures as the plot for their creative writing story.
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Musical Rhythm Instruments
Students develop a better understanding of rhythm instruments and their relationship to music. It also provides an understanding of the importance of color and shape in creative expression.
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Creating Your Own Story
Students think about a dramatic moment in their lives and imagine how to translate it into a work of art. They write their own personal experience as a story. They describe a visual image of their personal experience and/or story.
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Celebrating the Smithsonian's Birthday
Students examine online objects from the Smithsonian website and use them as subjects and inspiration for creative writing exercises.
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What Do Portraits Communicate?
Students make connections between their personal experiences and portraits. define a portrait and identify different kinds of portraits in artworks and their own lives. They look closely at a portrait using visual analysis to describe...
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Curator's Report
Students write a curator's report in order to persuade a board of directors to purchase an artwork for a museum.
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Barn Dance
Students will read historical realistic fiction, examine and recount the cultural similarities and diffferences between life and times of those characters in the story and their own life. Listen to music and learn a dance to accompany...
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Still-Life Painting: Arranging Nature
Students display the two still-life paintings that they created in previous lessons, along with their artist's statements. They write a review of a peer's work and discuss all of the paintings in a group critique.
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Buildings, Buildings Everywhere
Young scholars gain awareness of shapes in architecture by creating a painting of their school and writing a reflective summary of their study of architecture.
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People at Work
Students create a work of art and write a story about "Man with a Hoe Five Years Later." students also photograph their hands with a tool and write about what wonderful tools hands are.
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You Be the Critic!
Students review several pieces of art and choose one that inspires them. They research the artist and his or her contributions to art and then recreate the artwork and compare their copy to the original.
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Decorating Objects... and Re-decorating
Students create decorative objects and discuss their importance in form and function. In this art history lesson, students discuss Chinese porcelain objects with mounts later added by the Chinese. Students recreate an example of this art...
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Exploring Photographs - Writing the Artist's Statement
Students read an artist's statement by Dorothea Lange and write a statement based on their own photographs. For this photograph and writing lesson, students examine the relationship between photography and the artist's statement....
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How Do Portraits Communicate?
Students read a visual image very much like they would read words in a story. They write about portraits using new portrait vocabulary. They, in groups, use their written analysis to hypothesize about the story of the sitters in the...
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The life of William Ah Ket - Building bridges between East and West
Students read the story of William Ah Ket, an Australian-born Chinese man who became a respected leader in the community in the early twentieth century. This story is used as the context for research, vocabulary development and creative...
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Urban Concentration and Racial Violence
Students research one of the many urban race riots in U.S. history, from the New York City riots during the Civil War to the "Red Summer of 1919" or the hate-strikes of 1943. They present their findings in the form of a newspaper's front...
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A Simulation of the Electoral Process and the Resulting House of Commons
Students engage in a lesson which give them the knowledge, skills and an appreciation for the electoral process and parliamentary system.
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Reporting Live From...
Students examine the many disasters in West Virginia. For this US history lesson, students write about and give an oral presentation of one of the disasters as if they were reporters.
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Discover the History of Melody
Students connect to music resources. In this music lesson, students visit the websites of the Handel House Museum, the Horniman Museum, Reid Concert Hall, and the National Center for Early Music. Students...
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What's Your Impression
Young scholars examine the various artwork completed by Vincent Van Gogh. As a class, they are asked the question "What is it like to walk in your shoes?" They are to write a paper and draw their ideas to share with the class. They...
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Getting to Know You
Students complete an getting to know each other activity. In this personal names lesson, students play a name game, read a book about names, and then discuss why names are important. Students design a name card on oak tag rectangles and...
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Community Evolution: Putting the Puzzle Together
Pupils, working in groups, to study on aspect of their community history. They put their research together in one story about their community.
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Pick a Picture
First graders practice recognizing words with the short /a/ sound and applying /a/ phoneme in spoken words. They interact with the book, "Pat's Jam," and five picture cards with pictures of a hat, rat, cat, pig and a dog on each one....