As a new teacher in 2008, the author inherited an awesome advocacy tool from her predecessor, art educator Stephania Crowder, via her annual sidewalk art activity. In this activity, students recreate art masterpieces on a 4-5' (1-1.5 m) scale on the sidewalk leading to the front entrance of the school. This project never fails to garner positive…

The Dadaists were an unconventional group of artists who used their art to rebel against civilization in the early twentieth century. They experimented with a variety of media and often used machines as themes in their artwork. Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters incorporated city refuse into his collages, including bus tickets, newspapers, cartons,…

What if we hosted a banquet for famous artists and they came dressed in their own work? With this idea in mind, the author gathered materials on different artists from books, magazines, and the Internet. To simplify things somewhat, she only used artists from the mid-1800s to the present. The sixth graders made the artists' masks, placemats, and…

This article describes a miniature painting project that allows students to research a master painter and then replicate the work on a smaller scale. This lesson focuses on the students' ability to learn to identify style, subject matter, themes, and content in painting through the study of historical paintings, and the application of various…

The history of the photomontage spans artistic movements and political history. In the early twentieth century, Dada artists used the new media of mass-produced photographs to assemble collages that reflected their expression of the absurd. Russian Constructivists utilized their access to photographs and ability to quickly distribute completed…

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…

Creativity--where does it come from? When nurturing creativity, it is necessary to have an open mind. By nurturing a creative mind, one finds that artists' ideas flow freely, so students need to look deeper into the artworks, the artists' lives, and what was behind the inspiration for the work. Imagining themselves as one of the artists they have…

"Art history? Ugh!" is often the response of high-school visual arts students when faced with an art-history assignment. With the exception of very few students who might have an affection for the historical aspects of art, getting art history into the hearts and minds of high-school students can be a challenge. In this article, the author shares…

Plasticine clay is a bendable material that is easily manipulated by students of all ages. It is a great material to work with because it does not dry out from day to day, so high-school students can work on an extended project. They do not have to worry about the clay drying and cracking, and the entire work of art does not have to be completed…

The last two sections (EJ1039315 and EJ1039319) presented stories about specific moments or lessons. Also, situations infused with complexity where the writers had to toggle back and forth between providing the larger context and the details that support readers' understanding of that big picture were presented. In this section each story is…

The author could have chosen any ancient symbolic language, such as Egyptian or Pre-Columbian, but being from Denmark, she developed a unit that would introduce American students to artwork familiar to northern Europeans. Looking at examples of ancient art from Denmark and Sweden, students were to think about the use of symbols in ancient time and…

Louisville, Kentucky is an eclectic town of architectural styles from Greek revival to Renaissance Revival to Post modernism, not to mention an entire street dedicated to artsy mom and pop stores. Louisville is second only to the New York City Soho district in terms of the number of its cast-iron facades. Many of these building's fronts have…

Mentoring in classrooms allows teachers the opportunity to be motivational tools in the lives of students while operating as role models. The current research shows that mentoring in the art classroom provides stimulation and the momentum to students who are less motivated with creative assignments. The first part of this study looks at the…

Art history can be a little dry at times, but the author is always trying to incorporate new ways of teaching it. In this article, she describes a project in which students were to create a place setting out of clay that had to be unified through a famous artist's style. This place setting had to consist of at least five pieces (dinner plate, cup…

An art room should be a garden of visual stimulation, born of creativity, inquiry, critical thinking and intellectual conversation--and a little collaboration is not a bad thing either! When the author unpacked the new stools for her art room at the high school, she envisioned something more beautiful than the brown masonite circles that…