Excellent resources for classroom teachers and homeschooling parents who want to enrich their curriculum with meaningful art experiences, that's what I will write my paper about.
Visual arts education provides many benefits for children. Art helps children develop problem-solving skills and allows for self-expression and creativity. Art experiences can heighten self-esteem and help develop self-discipline and responsibility. Art experiences at school can increase children's motivation to learn and provide fulfillment through productivity. Producing and responding to art creates cultural and historical awareness and tends to improve academic performance.
Integrating the Arts
Common to all subject areas across the curriculum are various skills and processes, such as synthesis, analysis, reasoning, and communication. Integrating art with other disciplines supports the development of these skills and processes. Through integration, relationships among disciplines are made evident, multiple points of view are presented and relevance to student's lives is made clear.
Art Education Resources
I don't need someone to write my paper, I just want to share a few of my favorite art education resources with teachers and homeschooling parents who are looking for art enrichment activities to enhance their curriculum. These teaching resources are innovative, practical, and user-friendly. You will find both the content and the presentation engaging.
Arts Edge, the National Arts and Education Network, supports the placement of the arts at the center of the curriculum. This site empowers educators to teach in, through, and about the arts by providing the tools to develop interdisciplinary curricula that fully integrate the arts with other academic subjects. It offers free, standards-based teaching materials for use in and out of the classroom and guidelines for arts-based instruction and assessment.
Integrating the Arts is a web resource that uses the visual arts to teach concepts of social studies, science, language arts, and math curricula. These lessons were designed for middle school students but adaptable for elementary and high school. This site is ideal for visual arts teachers who want to integrate the arts into other disciplines or for non-arts teachers who want to venture into the world of art.
CanTeach is a Canadian-based website that provides educators with a valuable, extensive resource base. This site offers free lesson plans and other learning activities, as well as annotated links to help educators around the world integrate art into the curriculum.
The Educator's Reference Desk provides access to lesson plan collections, which contain more than 2000 unique lesson plans written and submitted by teachers from all over the United States. You will find links to Internet sites like Write My Paper NYC, educational organizations, and electronic discussion groups that relate to education.
Art Supply Companies Provide Teaching Resources
Companies like Crayola and Blick Art Materials provide online resources for parents and educators to inspire creativity in today's classroom or at home.
At the Crayola website, you will find hundreds of hands-on, standards-based lesson plan ideas designed to integrate the arts into the daily curriculum and stimulate independent thinking through visual learning. Search ideas by grade, subject, theme, and / or Crayola product. Crayola's Dream-Makers guides use visual arts lessons to stimulate critical thinking and problem solving for Math, Science, Language Arts and Social Studies.
Blick Art Materials is the premier art supply source for professional artists, students, and teachers. Their annual Educator's catalog, which is more than 600 pages, is considered the art educator's "bible." Their website offers hundreds of printable lesson plans and video workshops for classroom teachers and art specialists.
Art and Technology
Teach-nology is a web portal that offers a wide variety of free resources intended to bring educators into the world of teaching with technology. The site offers original content and software products designed to provide teachers with tools for creating instructional materials; and original publications created by experienced educators for other educators.
When a field trip is out of the question, you can journey to a virtual museum. Join Education World as they visit science, art, and history museums around the world. Meet Me Around the Corner, Virtual Field Trips for Kids provides educational podcasts. It is a dynamic, interactive site, which encourages individual expression and participation through video submissions from children worldwide. Through these video podcasts, they have created a community of children, who learn the art of self-expression and storytelling through video.
Rather than a resource for lesson ideas, ArtPad is an interactive website for digital painting that both children and adults will enjoy. Children can "paint" their own masterpiece or elaborate on an existing artwork of someone else's creation. The child-artists can “undo” each of the steps as many times as needed so they can express themselves with “reckless abandon!” Finished artworks can be printed, emailed and / or saved to the on-line gallery. A great art activity without the mess!
Meaningful Art Experiences for Children
Making, viewing and talking about art are all-important components of solid art education. Art education provides innumerable benefits for children of all ages; and meaningful art experiences can enrich a child's life for years to come.
Useful Notes
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Open Book Publishers' Online and Printed Academic Monographs
