Montague Township School District
Visual Arts Curriculum Guide
Grade 6
2025-2026
Melissa Neamand
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Description
Grade 6 Media and Visual Arts curriculum develops students' artistic literacy and fluency across four integrated processes: creating, producing, responding, and connecting. Students engage with multiple art movements, cultural art throughout history, and diverse artists to build creative and critical thinking skills. The curriculum emphasizes both media arts and visual arts, where students learn to create visual representations that communicate ideas, understand elements and principles of art, and develop the ability to analyze and respond to artworks from various contexts. Throughout the year, students apply aesthetic understanding and expression to make meaning from their personal experiences and the world around them.
Big Ideas
- Creativity and innovative thinking are essential life skills that develop through practice, experimentation, and constructive critique.
- Artists analyze, select, and curate works for presentation, and the presentation of artworks influences and shapes ideas, beliefs, and experiences.
- Through creating art, people make meaning by investigating culture, experiences, and awareness of their surroundings and communities.
- People evaluate art based on various criteria, and personal preference differs from critical evaluation.
- Art preserves and reflects the social, cultural, and political experiences of civilizations and communities.
Essential Questions
- What conditions, attitudes, and behaviors support creativity and innovative thinking?
- How do artists work, and how do they determine if their direction is effective?
- What role does persistence play in revising, refining, and developing work?
- How do we analyze and react to artworks, and what can we learn from our responses?
- How does art help us understand the lives of people of different times, places, and cultures?
- How do artworks influence ideas, beliefs, and experiences within a society?
Music - Connecting
Music - Creating
Music - Performing
Music - Responding
Media Arts - Connecting
Media Arts - Creating
Media Arts - Presenting
Media Arts - Responding
Students apply mathematical reasoning and measurement when creating visual representations, analyzing proportions in composition, and using geometric principles in design tasks.
Students investigate scientific concepts through artistic inquiry, explore the relationship between form and function in nature-based designs, and examine how scientific understanding informs creative processes.
Students analyze how art reflects and shapes cultural, historical, and social contexts. They explore the role of art in society, examine artistic movements across different time periods and cultures, and understand how artists respond to global issues including climate change.
Students develop written and oral communication skills through artistic critique, create narratives and descriptions in artist statements, engage in discussions about visual meaning and symbolism, and use academic vocabulary in visual analysis.
Students explore how art communicates across cultures and languages, examining artwork from diverse global traditions and connecting visual expression to cultural identity and heritage.
Students are assessed across all units using a variety of formative and summative methods. Formative assessments include group work, projects, discussions, teacher observation, skill testing, and peer evaluations. Summative assessments include rubric-based evaluation of artworks, digital rubrics on learning management systems for media arts, and performance tasks demonstrating understanding of artistic concepts. Benchmark assessments, alternative assessments, and critiques are used to evaluate student progress. Assessment tasks are aligned with learning objectives and require students to demonstrate proficiency in creating, producing, responding to, and connecting with artworks.
| Unit | Formative | Summative | Benchmark | Alternative |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Creating | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| 02Producing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 03Responding | ✓ | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| 04Connecting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coverage | 4/4 | 4/4 | 2/2 | 4/4 |
| Unit | IEP | 504 | MLL | At-Risk | Gifted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01Creating | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 02Producing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 03Responding | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| 04Connecting | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Coverage | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 | 4/4 |