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. In media arts, students make and respond using media arts knowledge, understanding, and skills to represent meaning associated with personal and global views. Students create art that tells a story or describes life events in home, school, and community. They compare and contrast why people from different places and times make art and describe why people make art about different issues, including climate change.
Essential Questions
- How does engaging in creating art enrich people's lives?
- How does art help us understand the lives of people of different times, places, and cultures?
- How is art used to impact the views of a society?
- How do media artworks contribute to an awareness and understanding of our lives and communities?
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 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
- Index cards for recording personal connections to artworks and artists
- Whiteboard and markers for creating visual lists of cultural influences
- Lined journals for students to write reflections connecting personal experiences to art
Music - Connecting
Media Arts - Connecting
Students employ mathematical thinking to explore patterns, measurements, and spatial relationships in artmaking and design. Mathematical concepts support the development of visual compositions and understanding of geometric properties in art.
Students investigate natural and constructed environments through observation and experimentation. Scientific inquiry processes inform artistic exploration of materials, their properties, and transformations.
Students examine how art reflects and shapes cultural and historical contexts across different communities and time periods. Art serves as a primary source for understanding diverse perspectives and values of societies.
Students use written and oral communication to describe, analyze, and interpret artworks. Narrative and descriptive writing support artistic expression and reflection on creative processes.
Formative Assessments
- Group work discussing connections between personal experiences and artworks
- Projects demonstrating understanding of cultural and historical contexts
- Class discussions and question-and-answer sessions about artistic intent and cultural perspectives
Summative Assessment
For visual arts: 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; for media arts: students explain, evaluate, and demonstrate how media arts expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences
Benchmark Assessment
A task where students create a simple artwork or collage that tells a story from their home, school, or community, paired with a brief oral or written response explaining the story and why they chose to show it this way. This measures students' ability to connect personal experiences to art creation and understand that people make art to share their lives and ideas.
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through a teacher-guided conversation about personal experiences and artworks, with visual supports such as image cards or simplified comparison charts. Students may respond orally or use drawings, symbols, or gestures to show connections between their lives and the art being studied.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students with IEPs may benefit from visual supports such as picture sequences or graphic organizers to help them plan and express the story or cultural connection in their artwork before beginning. Oral responses and dictation should be accepted as alternatives to written explanations when students are asked to describe artistic intent or cultural meaning. Teachers should break multi-step art-making tasks into smaller, numbered stages and check in frequently to provide feedback and keep students on track. Models of completed artwork that demonstrate how personal experience or cultural context can be expressed visually should be available throughout the unit.
Section 504
Students with 504 plans should be provided preferential seating during class discussions about cultural and historical contexts to support focus and participation. Extended time should be offered for projects and reflective tasks that ask students to connect personal experience to artwork. Directions for multi-part tasks should be provided in both oral and printed formats to support processing and reduce barriers to access.
ELL / MLL
Multilingual learners benefit from rich visual cues throughout this unit — including artwork examples, photographs of community life, and cultural artifacts — that support comprehension of concepts like artistic intent and cultural context without relying solely on language. Key vocabulary related to art, culture, and storytelling should be introduced with visual references and, where possible, reinforced in the student's home language. Teachers should offer simplified, direct instructions and invite students to express connections between their personal experiences and artwork through drawing, gesture, or spoken word before moving to written or verbal English responses.
At Risk (RTI)
Students who need additional support should be given accessible entry points into this unit by encouraging them to start with their own familiar experiences — home, school, or neighborhood — as the foundation for their artwork before making broader cultural or historical connections. Reducing the complexity of comparison tasks by focusing on one artist or artwork at a time can help build confidence and understanding. Visual examples and teacher modeling of how personal stories can be shown through art will help students connect meaningfully with the content at their current level.
Gifted & Talented
Students who are ready for deeper engagement should be encouraged to investigate the historical or cultural background of a specific artistic movement or tradition featured in the unit and consider how that context shaped the artist's choices and message. They may explore how a single theme — such as community, identity, or environmental change — has been interpreted differently across cultures or time periods, and reflect on what those differences reveal about values and beliefs. Encouraging these students to make and articulate deliberate stylistic or compositional choices in their own work, and to explain the reasoning behind those choices using art vocabulary, will extend their thinking beyond surface-level connections.