Students observe live insects and examine insects depicted in a seventeenth-century drawing. They identify the three characteristics of an adult insect: a three-part body (head, thorax, and abdomen), six legs, and antennae. They collect and draw live insects, incorporating a variety of shapes and lines.

Students observe and study insects depicted in a seventeenth-century drawing. They identify characteristics common to all insects and those unique to particular species. Students research and draw insects, incorporating a variety of lines and shapes and using value to depict three-dimensionality.

Students will be singing the blues in this lesson in which they identify themes from "The Gift of the Magi" and write and present blues poetry based on those themes.

During writing workshop, students research, write, revise, and share their own comprehensive biographies of African American jazz musicians.

Advanced-level students will examine photographs depicting suburban development; conduct independent research on land use; and design a plan for a utopian, environmentally-friendly housing development in their city.

Beginning-level students will compare and contrast different uses of land in the state of California and write a letter about a modern-day environmental issue.

Students will read writings by Ralph Waldo Emerson and discuss the principles of transcendentalism. They will then discuss a landscape photograph by Carleton Watkins and use pinhole cameras to create photographic essays depicting a modern-day environmental issue.

Students pair Dorothea Lange's photographs with passages from John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Students create an oral group presentation and discuss the relationship between the images and text.

Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.

In this lesson students perform a line dance to reinforce story telling through movement.

Students will compare the daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe by an unknown photographer with Poe's writings in an effort to discover the character of this mysterious author.

Students explore the theme of love of war through texts on camaraderie among soldiers. They then compose a visual collage depicting their beliefs about the relationship between love and war.

Students put their science and art skills to work learning how to make and experiment with egg tempera paint like artists in Medieval Europe did.

Students will compare portrayals of individual soldiers to depictions of battle scenes, write two articles representing two different perspectives about a current war, and manipulate a photograph to alter its mood.

Students will compare and contrast artworks depicting different viewpoints about war and will write captions that describe works of art in different media. They will also manipulate the image depicted in a photograph of a war in recent history.

Art students create portraits for youth around the world who've been neglected, orphaned, or disadvantaged.

Invite students to share and discuss a song of their choice with lyrics that contain a social, political or cultural message relevant to a contemporary social justice issue. Students will lead their peers through a close reading and discussion of the song’s lyrics, and create a written analysis of the song, its lyrics, and its message. To help anchor their analysis, teachers may use the Critical Literacy Text-Dependent Question Stems template in the lesson. Students can organize their writing along the eight areas, while choosing from the list of prompts in each area. (Note: Teacher discretion will be necessary for handling lyrics that use explicit language.) Use the suggested activity and strategies below to empower students to lead the lesson with their peers as the students.

Students will whistle while they work on this lesson, creating a photomontage movie of their interpretation of a favorite song's lyrics that will end everyone's day on a high note.

Students study how artists of the Neoclassical period were influenced by major historical events during the Enlightenment. They will identify and analyze the Neoclassical style.

Do art and math have anything in common? How do artists and architects use math to create their works? In these lessons, students will explore the intersection of math and art in the works of two artists and one architect for whom mathematical concepts (lines, angles, two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional polyhedra, fractions, ratios, and permutations) and geometric forms were fundamental.