619.677.0751 Projects are co-designed by artist-teacher teams to meet the needs of individual classes.
The following projects demonstrate the power of art to make learning meaningful and engaging. Lesson plans are meant to serve as guides rather than comprehensive instructions. We hope that you find these projects inspiring. Adapt, modify or simplify these projects to best support your students in becoming active participants in their own learning.
Descriptive Language: An Exploration of Shape Poetry
Students create a shape poetry painting using descriptive language and landform illustrations. Students learn various art techniques, including shape poetry, watercolor resist, collage, and illustration. Students were struggling with their
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Where We Come from: Cultural Posters
Students assume the roles of interviewers, historians, researchers, thinkers, writers, and artists as they independently create cultural posters to explore their ancestry. In addition to information obtained from their families,
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Spirals of Theodorus
This project was founded on the idea that math is not merely problems on worksheets but a specific way of understanding and recording the world. To help students recognize the
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An Exploration of the First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest Culture
Students’ research into the First Peoples of the Pacific Northwest region centers around totem poles created by these cultures. These totem poles tell of family stories, using animals to portray
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Dancing the Stories from Our Ancestors’ Countries
Second graders explore English Language Arts and History-Social Sciences content through creative movement. Beginning with currency from students’ ancestors’ countries of origin, students analyze features on their currency, work collaboratively
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Biomimicry: Engineering a Solution Using Animal Parts
Students learn to draw three-dimensionally, design a blueprint, and create a model/prototype in order to solve a human-impact problem using inspiration from a chosen animal part. This project was developed
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Sunlight and Ocean Life
Students deepen an understanding of the importance of sunlight and water, the interdependent relationships within an ecosystem, and the need of sunlight and water for plants’ and animals’ survival. Students
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Mask Making: The Retelling of Ungalala by Brenda Parkes
Students learn to draw through shapes, break down animal faces into the mathematical concept of parts of a whole, and plan/design in order to create a three-dimensional mask of one
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How Can We Solve This Problem? A First-Grade Reader’s Theatre Exploration of Making Positive Choices
First graders explore citizenship, rules, and making positive choices in a collaboration of acting, writing, and reader’s theatre. In this project, students role-play and use real-life situations to create scenes,
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Exploring Collaboration and Narratives through Photography
Students work collaboratively in groups to create photo collages synthesizing their comprehension of photography techniques with chronological storytelling. After learning and applying a series of photographic techniques, such as perspective
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Wearable Sculptures of Animal Adaptations
Third-grade students embody the spirit of animals after creating wearable sculptures of animal adaptations. Children begin by learning to carefully observe animals up close—actual specimens from the Natural History Museum—and
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The War That Saved My Life Artists’ Books
Using a variety of illustration techniques, students create richly textured artists’ books as they perform a close reading of The War That Saved My Life, by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. Through
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Penguins at Play
Learning comes naturally and spontaneously through play, and this project focuses on using play to make learning fun and engaging for kinder students. To align with their physical science unit
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Character Transformation Books
Each week, students collectively examine the transformation of characters in Kevin Henkes’s books. Independently, students create weekly pages to be housed in their literary accordion and bookmark books. The first
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Flood Barrier Design Challenge
Students combine engineering with visual art and collaboration in this flood-barrier design challenge project. After developing their observation, drawing, and note-taking skills through a series of observational drawing activities, students
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Modeling Energy Transfer with Creative Movement and Visual Art
In this project, students integrate creative movement, visual art, NGSS Physical Science, and English Language Arts writing. Students imagine what energy looks like and create a prop to symbolize it.
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School Map
What is the makeup of a community? Who are its members and what activities do they carry out? Where is our school located? These questions guide research on the geographical
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Matter, Properties, and Building on a Budget
Combining NGSS science and engineering perspectives, students set off on an exploration of the properties of materials and their suitability for specific purposes. Students begin by investigating solids and liquids,
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Unlikely Friendships: An Exploration of Characters, Settings, and Following Rules
Students write and illustrate a class book about two unlikely friends and the importance of following rules. Students analyze settings, characters, and scenarios in order to design, create, illustrate, and
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Patterns in the Sky
To align with their NGSS Earth and Space unit, and the enduring cross-cutting concept of patterns, students create artists’ books to describe the patterns that we can observe in our
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