mm = link to high school example
msm = link to middle school example
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Digital Age Literacy
Basic, Scientific and Technological Literacies
Visual and Information Literacies
Multicultural Literacy and Global Awareness
Effective Communication
Teaming, Collaboration and Interpersonal Skills
Personal, Social and Civic Responsibility
Interactive Communication
Inventive Thinking
Adaptibility, Managing Complexity and Self-Direction
Curiosity, Creativity and Risk Taking
High Order Thinking and Sound Reasoning
High Productivity
Prioritizing, Planning and Managing
Effective Use of Real World Tools
Ability to Produce Relavant, High Quality Products
The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships.
The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer.
The arts celebrate multiple perspectives.
The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving, purposes are seldom fixed but change with circumstances and opportunity.
The arts make vivid the fact that neither words nor numbers define what we can know.
The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects.
The arts teach students to think through and within a material.
The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said.
The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source and through such experience to discover the range and variety of what we are capable of feeling.
The arts position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important.
 
Teaching Basic Principles

Beginning in Grade 6, every art project contains two conceptual threads that weave through the curriculum.  The concepts known as the Formal Elements of Art and the Principles of Design are critical to understanding how visual language works.  Projects are designed to give students the opportunity to apply these concepts in a studio setting as well as analyzing these concepts in both their own and professional works of art.

mm a presentation on the Principles of Design
a presentation on the Formal Elementsnts
Analyzing Visual Information

In each project students look at and analyze works of art that have historical or popular significance related to the studio project on which they will be working.  They use a From, Theme and Context approach to art criticism which requires them to analyze the form of the art work, interpret and evaluate the "big ideas" of the artist, and examine the context in which the work was made to extract meaning.

mm an assignment leading students through this process
an assignment about composition
Applying Principles in the Studio

Students then engage in a studio project that incorporates these concepts.  From the planning stage through the execution of the project students must manipulate (which may include ignoring) the Formal Elements and the Principles of Design to create their own visually effective and expressive art works.  Finding inventive ways to use these concepts to create meaning utilizes higher level thinking skills as well as developing manual dexterity and a sense of how things work.

visit the ASB virtual gallery
developing studio skill
Self Reflection

Upon the completion of a project students are asked to reflect on how well they were able to realize their original plan.  This can take different forms, but it always includes a self-assessment of how well the students have found the answers to a project’s Essential Questions.  When appropriate, those questions include the Formal Elements and Principles of Design the students write about their own work as if they were writing about professional art work.

mm student relfection from a Installation project msm1 student reflection for a grade 7 project
msm2 oral presentation rubric
What Students Are Saying

"Art this year has been a very good learning experience for me. It has taught me new ideas and concepts, and has helped me to refine old ones. I feel that I have improved most in balance, Unity and variety, and I have started to reflect on my work with more criticism and generally have gotten much better at it as compared to the beginning of the year. I feel that I can create better balance in my compositions now as opposed to the beginning of the year because I feel that I have gotten a better feeling for what balance means. - grade 9 student.

I learned lots of new skills such as how to use shapes and lines to make a picture. I also learned that all pictures have the different Elements of Art. I also liked the one point perspective unit that we did because it was really cool knowing that we could just use a pencil to make our picture look as if it is 3D and you could put your hand into it. -MS Student

In the central column below are the guiding principles that inform the curriculum connection highlighted on this page.  The 21st Century Skills and “Ten Lessons” that are woven into these elements appear in white in the corresponding columns to the right and left. Links to teacher and student generated material illustrating how these guiding principles take form in the classroom can be found below as well.