Montague Township School District
Visual Arts Curriculum Guide
Grade 1
2025-2026
Melissa Neamand
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Description
The Grade 1 Media and Visual Arts curriculum provides students with foundational experiences in creating, presenting, responding to, and connecting with visual and media arts. Through four interconnected units, students explore materials, artistic ideas, and cultural expressions while developing creativity and critical thinking. The curriculum emphasizes hands-on art making, exposure to diverse artists and movements, analysis of artwork, and connections between personal experiences and artistic practices. Students learn to work with various media, understand presentation and curation processes, interpret and evaluate artworks, and recognize how the arts reflect society and culture across different times and places.
Big Ideas
- Creativity and innovative thinking develop through exploration, experimentation, and reflection on artistic processes.
- Artists use various techniques, materials, and methods to express ideas and communicate meaning.
- Responding to and analyzing artworks deepens aesthetic awareness and appreciation of diverse perspectives.
- Art reflects and preserves the values, experiences, and histories of individuals and communities.
Essential Questions
- How do artists and designers generate ideas and develop creative work?
- How do artists select, analyze, and present their work to communicate meaning?
- How do we interpret, analyze, and evaluate artworks based on various criteria?
- How do personal experiences and cultural contexts shape artistic creation and understanding?
Music - Connecting
Music - Creating
Music - Performing
Music - Responding
Media Arts - Connecting
Media Arts - Creating
Media Arts - Presenting
Media Arts - Responding
Students engage in spatial reasoning and pattern recognition through art-making activities. Students compose and decompose shapes, organize and represent data through visual representations, and apply measurement and geometric thinking in creating and analyzing artworks.
Students investigate and construct evidence-based accounts through artistic observation and exploration. Students plan and conduct investigations, analyze and interpret visual information, and make observations to understand natural and constructed environments.
Students develop understanding of community, culture, and history through visual arts. Students compare and contrast artworks from different cultures and time periods, analyze how art reflects societal values and beliefs, and investigate how communities change and are represented through artistic expression.
Students use language to describe, analyze, and discuss artworks. Students ask and answer questions about visual elements, provide written and oral responses to artistic work, and use vocabulary to explain preferences and interpretations of art.
Students are assessed through a variety of formative, summative, and alternative approaches throughout the year. Ongoing formative assessments include group work, projects, discussions, and question-and-answer activities. Summative assessments involve performance tasks and transfer tasks that demonstrate student understanding of elements and principles of art, ability to create works that tell stories or express ideas, and capacity to analyze and interpret artworks from diverse cultural contexts. Benchmark assessments include school-wide displays of student work, end-of-year art shows, and virtual museum exploration activities.
| Unit | Formative | Summative | Benchmark | Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Creating | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| 02Producing/Presenting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 03Responding | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| 04Connecting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coverage | 4/4 | 4/4 | 2/2 | 4/4 |
| Unit | IEP | 504 | MLL | At-Risk | Gifted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Creating | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 02Producing/Presenting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 03Responding | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 04Connecting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coverage | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 |