Hot Docs
Docs for School: Viewing and Teaching Guide
Teaching documentary in your class? Inform your instruction with a guide meant to support teachers as they begin with documentary. The resource includes information on what a documentary is as well as documentary modes, elements, and...
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Dear Sassy Successful Student
Fifth graders identify the people who are responsible for their success and their current studying skills. In groups, they brainstorm helpful studying strategies and develop a creative way to share it with the class. To end the lesson,...
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Biomes Newsletter Report
If your class will be studying biomes and you also want to address some technology standards, check this out! Each class member becomes an expert on 1 biome through online research, and writes a 4-page report that covers climate,...
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Taxed Tempers Toss Tea To Tides
Engage learners in persuasive writing, research, and creative thinking. They research the series of events that led to the Boston Tea Party and create brochures that include propaganda intended to rally Patriot support or dissuade...
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Food and Languages of the World
Students engage in creative bead making while discussing Africa. In this diversity and arts lesson, students create African necklaces while being introduced to the African culture.
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Realism: Landscape
Students watch videos and experiment with different mediums of art. Each day students create a project with different materials.
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Cartoon Creation
Fifth graders create four to six illustrations that produce sequential movement and change when rapidly flipped through with a thumb. Students demonstrate motion and change are shown in a series of illustrations by sharing original...
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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 lesson, students identify symbols and imagery that are connected to a specific...
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Temperature Stories
Students 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
Pupils 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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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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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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Still-Life Painting: Arranging Nature
Young scholars 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
Students 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. For this art history lesson, students discuss Chinese porcelain objects with mounts later added by the Chinese. Students recreate an example of this...
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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. In this photograph and writing lesson, students examine the relationship between photography and the artist's statement. Students...
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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
Learners 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...