Language Arts
This section promotes students to actively respond to works of art. Students have the opportunity to assess what they have discovered and define what they still want to know. The pre-visit activity, Art Analysis and Creative Writing, asks students to write a fictional narrative based on a work of art. This exercise reveals how works of art elicit multiple interpretations. The on-site activity, Sharing Stories, Looking at Books and Paintings, asks students to share their personal perspectives, vi
Changing Union
This lesson allows students the opportunity to analyze a document and make assessment and historical prediction based on the text.
What Can Printed Material Teach Us?
This lessons allows students the opportunity to analyze a document, make assessment and obtain historical content through primary source documents.
Music to Our Ears
This lesson allows students to visualize early musical influences of African-Americans in jazz and understand the impact of this music/dance. This lesson is based on the understanding that students have already been exposed to news reel as primary source documents in the Social Studies classroom (this can be done in succession with Lesson #1 and#2 or as a stand alone lesson during African-American History Month or during another teacher-chosen unit).
Digital Karnak
A team of noted Egyptologists, educators, architects, and technologists were brought together to develop learning resources related to the Temple at Karnak in Egypt. The project had three primary goals: (1) to assemble databases of information related to Karnak, (2) build an interactive computer model of the site, and (3) create a series of resources using the model and databases that are available online free-of-charge through this website and can be easily used for undergraduate education.
Eco Mandalas
Using the art of Andy Goldworthy as inspiration, Elders create mandalas using nature based materials. Focus on history of mandalas, use of balance, texture, color. Lesson created for Elders, but could be used for any age.
Footprint Art
Simple art lesson for getting kids in touch with their bodies and their individuality. Ties into historical Buddhist footprint art.
Emboss rubbings
Create embossed surfaces for students to make rubbings. Inexpensive materials, reusable.
Image Transfer Fabric Art
Students will learn how to transfer a printed image on to fabric
History, Healing, and Hope Community Workshop
Describes how a teaching artist collaborates with a community group and an art gallery to create an intergenerational workshop for healing and storytelling around the wounds of war.
Bebop and Modernism
In this lesson students will study how social and economic changes in post–World War II America influenced arts and culture. Students will learn about the experience of African Americans in the postwar period, including the civil rights movement and desegregation, and the influence of these experiences on African-American culture. Students will study how competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War contributed to the popularity of jazz around the world. They will learn about the music
Jazz Age and the Swing Era
Students will gain knowledge about major new developments in cultural and social life during the 1920s and 1930s and will learn how these developments were influenced by political, economic, and international events. Students will understand how jazz developed and spread throughout the country through regional bands, migration, interaction between black and white musicians, and the application of new technology. Students will learn how the evolution of jazz was influenced by Prohibition, the Gre
Advent of Jazz
Jazz grew out of the African-American community at the turn of the 20th century, a time when blacks were being denied their most basic rights. The music has since become a part of every American's birthright, a timeless symbol of American individualism and ingenuity, American democracy and inclusiveness. In this lesson students will learn about the social, cultural, and economic origins of jazz within the African-American community.
You Kiss by the Book': Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet presents "star-cross'd" lovers whose plight has become the subject of many of today's novels, plays, films, and television dramas. Explore with your students the techniques that Shakespeare uses to capture the magic of the couple's first meeting and to make that meeting so memorable. This lesson plan complements the study of plot and characterization in Romeo and Juliet in its focus on lyrical form and convention that heighten the impact of the action on the stage.
Research and Investigation Project: A Grave Undertaking
The central focus of the Research and Investigation Project (RIP): A Grave Undertaking unit is an exploration of the lives of individuals who lived in Deerfield from 1780-1880. Throughout their investigations of the past, students analyze a variety of primary and secondary sources and material culture to draw inferences about their research subjects, Deerfield's history, and the history of the country during this 100-year period. The five lessons in this unit take three to four weeks to complete
Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts
As electronic resources continue to permeate scholarship, the challenge of keeping abreast with new developments becomes ever more pressing. The Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts seeks to provide a technological solution to a simple and rather delightful "problem": the breathtaking increase in the number of medieval manuscripts available on the web in their entirety, but in a bewildering range of venues and formats.
Digital Roman Forum
The purpose of the modeling project was to spatialize information and theories about how the Forum looked on June 21, 400 A.D., which was more or less the height of its development as Rome as a civic and cultural center. The digital model includes over twenty features (buildings and major monuments) filling up the western zone of the Roman Forum from the Temple of Vesta and Temple of Antoninus and Faustina on the east to the Tabularium facing the western slope of the Capitoline Hill.
Drop Me Off in Harlem
What happens when great minds congregate in the same time and place? How do creative individuals both reflect and influence the places and time periods in which they live? Drop Me Off in Harlem explores these questions in the context of the vibrant, complex, and unique moment in time that was the Harlem Renaissance.
Celebrating Stephen Sondheim
Looking for ways to introduce students to one of the most influential figures in musical theatre history? These lesson plans and activities, a comprehensive glossary of terms, and additional resources will introduce students to the magical world of musicals and the legendary Stephen Sondheim.
Celebrates Louis Armstrong
You can teach your students about jazz and Armstrong's contribution to music without having to create a lesson plan. These standards-based lessons are informative, fun, and ready for you to use in the classroom.
