Unit 4 — Connecting
Description
Upon exposure to various artists, artistic movements, and diverse cultures, students make connections between their personal experiences and artwork to the content and context being taught. Students understand the role, development, and influence of the arts throughout history and across cultures. Through art making, students make meaning by investigating and developing awareness of perceptions, knowledge, and experiences. Students learn how art helps us understand the lives of people from different times, places, and cultures and how art is used to impact the views of society.
Essential Questions
- How does engaging in creating art enrich people's lives?
- How does art help us understand the lives of people from different times, places, and cultures?
- How is art used to impact the views of a society?
- How do personal and cultural experiences inform artistic creation and response?
Learning Objectives
- Create art that tells a story or describes life events in home, school, and community.
- Compare, contrast, and describe why people from different places and times make art.
- Describe why people from different places and times make art about different issues, including climate change.
- Use personal experiences, interests, information, and models in creating media artworks.
- Share and discuss experiences of media artworks, describing their meaning and purpose.
- Discuss and demonstrate how media artworks, messages, environments, and ideas relate to everyday and cultural life.
- Interact appropriately with media arts tools and environments considering safety, rules, and fairness.
Supplemental Resources
- Books and webpages featuring artists from diverse cultures and time periods
- Student work samples showing connections to personal and community experiences
- Guest speakers and visiting artists for direct connections to art practice
- Printed images of artworks reflecting different cultural perspectives and historical periods
Music - Connecting
Media Arts - Connecting
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.
Formative Assessments
- Group work on collaborative projects connecting art to personal experiences
- Projects creating artwork that tells stories from community or personal life
- Discussions about cultural and historical contexts of artworks
- Question and answer activities about connections between art and daily life
Summative Assessment
Using age-appropriate stylistic terminology and experimenting with various compositional approaches, students recognize works of visual art as reflections of a society's values and beliefs. Through making art, students make meaning by investigating their awareness of culture and personal experiences. Students explain, evaluate, and demonstrate how media arts expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences.
Benchmark Assessment
A short art creation task where students make a simple artwork depicting a personal or community experience, then orally or with teacher support explain what their art shows and why people make art about their lives. This assesses understanding of art as storytelling and awareness of art's role in different cultures and communities.
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through verbal descriptions of their artwork and its connection to personal experiences, supported by visual prompts or picture cards showing different artists and cultures. Teacher-guided conversations and simplified graphic organizers with images may replace written responses.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students may benefit from visual supports such as picture-supported prompts or graphic organizers that help them connect personal experiences to artwork and cultural content. Oral responses, dictation, or drawing in place of written output allows students to demonstrate understanding of how art reflects culture and community life. Teachers may chunk discussion tasks into smaller steps and provide a model or example artwork to anchor meaning-making before students begin their own creations. Frequent check-ins and positive feedback during art-making and group discussions help students build confidence and stay connected to the unit's themes.
Section 504
Students may benefit from preferential seating during group discussions and whole-class art viewing to support focus and engagement with cultural and historical content. Extended time during reflective or media arts tasks ensures students can process and respond thoughtfully without feeling rushed. A low-distraction environment during independent art-making supports sustained attention when students are connecting personal experiences to their artwork.
ELL / MLL
Visual cues such as images of artworks, cultural artifacts, and community scenes help students access unit vocabulary and concepts without relying solely on language. Key vocabulary related to art, culture, and community should be introduced with visual support and reinforced throughout discussions and art-making activities. Teachers may use simplified directions and allow students to respond in their home language or through drawing when expressing connections between their personal experiences and the artworks being explored.
At Risk (RTI)
Students benefit from beginning with familiar entry points, such as artwork or cultural imagery connected to their own community or home life, before expanding to broader historical or global contexts. Reducing the complexity of comparison tasks — for example, focusing on one similarity or difference between two artworks — allows students to experience success while still engaging with key concepts. Hands-on art-making and collaborative discussion provide accessible, low-barrier ways for students to demonstrate their understanding of how art connects to everyday life.
Gifted & Talented
Students may be encouraged to explore deeper connections between artworks and their cultural or historical contexts, considering how an artist's background or society influenced their choices and messages. Rather than simply describing art, these students can be challenged to investigate how a specific theme — such as community, identity, or environmental change — appears across multiple cultures or time periods and reflect on what that reveals about shared human experience. Teachers may invite these students to experiment with combining multiple media or compositional approaches to communicate a personally meaningful message, pushing beyond the expected scope of the unit.