Unit 4 — Connecting
Description
Students make connections between their personal experiences and artwork with the content and context being taught. In media arts, students make and respond using media arts knowledge, understanding, and skills to represent meaning associated with personal and global views. Students understand the role, development, and influence of the arts throughout history and across cultures. Students recognize that works of visual art reflect a society's values and beliefs, use age-appropriate stylistic terminology to describe artworks, and experiment with various compositional approaches. Through making art, students make meaning by investigating their awareness of culture and personal experiences.
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 the other arts, disciplines, contexts, and daily life inform the creation and response to media arts?
Learning Objectives
- Create works of art that reflect community cultural traditions and discuss using formal and conceptual vocabulary
- Communicate how art is used to inform the values, beliefs, and culture of an individual or society
- Communicate how art is used to inform others about global issues, including climate change
- Use, examine, and access internal and external resources to create media artworks such as interests, knowledge, and experiences
- Identify, examine, and show how media artworks form meanings, situations, and cultural experiences
- Identify, explain, research, and show how media artworks and ideas relate to personal, social, and community life
- Examine, discuss, and interact appropriately with media arts tools and environments, considering safety, ethics, rules, and media literacy
Supplemental Resources
- Virtual images and web resources for cultural research
- Posters representing diverse artists and cultural movements
- Books featuring artworks from different cultures and time periods
- Index cards or sentence strips for organizing cultural connections
- Folders or binders for collecting cultural research and references
Music - Connecting
Media Arts - Connecting
Students apply mathematical thinking and problem-solving strategies when creating artworks, measuring materials, analyzing proportions, and organizing visual elements using geometric principles and spatial reasoning.
Students examine how artworks reflect cultural traditions, historical contexts, and diverse perspectives from various communities and time periods, analyzing the role of art in society and its connections to human experience.
Students develop visual literacy and communication skills by discussing artworks using formal vocabulary, writing about artistic intent and meaning, and engaging in collaborative conversations about aesthetic and cultural analysis.
Formative Assessments
- Group work and collaborative projects
- Class discussions about connections between art and society
- Question-and-answer sessions about cultural and personal context
- Student reflection on their own cultural awareness
Summative Assessment
Students explain, evaluate, and demonstrate how media arts expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences. Students access and use internal and external resources to educate about the creation of media artworks. 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 demonstrate meaning-making by investigating their awareness of culture and personal experiences.
Benchmark Assessment
A mid-unit task in which students select or create a visual artwork, identify the cultural tradition or global issue it reflects, and explain using at least three pieces of formal or conceptual vocabulary how the artwork communicates values, beliefs, or meaning. This assesses their ability to make connections between personal experience and artistic content, foundational to the unit's learning objectives.
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through verbal descriptions of artworks and their cultural connections, recorded as audio or video, in place of written explanations. Visual supports such as vocabulary cards, image organizers, or demonstration-based responses may be provided to support comprehension and expression of ideas.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students with IEPs may benefit from scaffolded supports that help them access and express connections between personal experience and cultural content, such as graphic organizers for organizing ideas before discussion or art-making, and visual reference banks of vocabulary terms paired with images. Teachers should offer flexible output options — including verbal explanation, drawing, or gesture — when students are asked to reflect on cultural meaning or describe artworks using formal vocabulary. Breaking multi-step projects into sequenced, checkable stages and providing frequent check-ins will support sustained engagement with the unit's collaborative and reflective tasks.
Section 504
Students with 504 plans should be given extended time during discussions and reflection activities that ask them to connect personal experience to cultural and global themes in art. Preferential seating near instructional displays and reduced visual clutter around reference materials will help students access compositional and cultural vocabulary during class discussions and group work.
ELL / MLL
Multilingual learners benefit from visual supports that anchor the cultural and art-specific vocabulary central to this unit — such as illustrated word walls that pair terms like 'tradition,' 'values,' and 'composition' with images. Teachers should use clear, simplified directions and allow students to initially discuss ideas in their home language before sharing with the class, building confidence when communicating how art reflects personal and cultural experience. Connecting unit themes to students' own cultural backgrounds and traditions can serve as a meaningful entry point into the content.
At Risk (RTI)
Students who need additional support should be connected to the unit's themes through personal and familiar cultural references before expanding to broader or global contexts, helping to build confidence and prior knowledge as a foundation. Teachers can reduce complexity by focusing initial art-making tasks on one clear connection — such as a single community tradition or personal experience — before layering in formal vocabulary or compositional expectations. Providing structured reflection prompts with sentence starters will support participation in class discussions and group work.
Gifted & Talented
Students who are ready for greater depth can be invited to research the historical or cross-cultural context of a specific art movement or cultural tradition in detail, drawing meaningful comparisons between how different societies use art to communicate values and respond to global issues such as climate change. These students might also explore how media arts tools and ethical considerations shift across cultural or historical contexts, presenting their findings through a self-directed media artwork or analysis that demonstrates higher-order thinking about art as a vehicle for social meaning.