Unit 4 — Connecting
Description
Upon exposure to various artists, artistic movements, and diverse cultures, students make connections with their personal experiences and artwork to 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. In visual arts, students understand the role, development, and influence of the arts throughout history and across cultures. Students recognize that artworks reflect a society's values and beliefs and that art preserves and reflects social, cultural, and political experiences. Through artmaking, students make meaning by investigating culture and developing awareness of perceptions, knowledge, and personal experiences.
Essential Questions
- How does engaging in creating art enrich people's lives? How does making art attune people to their surroundings?
- 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 does engaging in creating media artworks enrich people's lives?
- How does art mirror aspects of life? How do other arts, disciplines, contexts, and daily life inform the creation of artworks?
Learning Objectives
- Access, evaluate and use internal and external resources to inform the creation of artworks, such as cultural and societal knowledge, research and exemplary works
- Explain and demonstrate how artworks expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences, such as local and global events
- Generate ideas to make art individually or collaboratively to positively reflect a group's identity
- Analyze and contrast how art forms are used to represent, establish, reinforce and reflect group identity and culture
- Analyze and contrast how art forms are used to reflect global issues, including climate change
- Recognize works of visual art as a reflection of a society's values and beliefs
Supplemental Resources
- Newspaper or magazine clippings for connecting art to current events and global issues
- Chart paper for mapping connections between artworks and cultural contexts
- Sticky notes for collaborative brainstorming about cultural influences
- Printed word lists of stylistic terminology for art analysis
- Folders or binders for collecting and organizing research on artists and cultures
Music - Connecting
Media Arts - Connecting
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.
Formative Assessments
- Class discussions connecting artworks to personal experiences
- Question and answer sessions about cultural and historical contexts
- Group work on collaborative art projects
- Reflection activities on connections between art and community
Summative Assessment
Students explain, evaluate, and demonstrate how artworks expand meaning and knowledge and create cultural experiences. Using age-appropriate stylistic terminology, students recognize works of visual art as a reflection of society's values and beliefs. Students access and use internal and external resources to educate about the creation of artworks reflecting cultural perspectives.
Benchmark Assessment
Group work, projects, question and answer, discussion
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through an oral presentation, recorded video response, or visual presentation (poster, collage, or annotated images) in place of written explanations. Visual supports such as image banks, comparison charts, or sentence frames may be provided to help students organize their thinking about how artworks connect to culture and personal experience.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students may benefit from visual supports such as image-rich reference materials and graphic organizers that help them connect artworks to cultural and historical contexts without relying solely on written text. Providing sentence frames or word banks for discussion and reflection activities supports students who need scaffolding to articulate their thinking about art, culture, and identity. When demonstrating understanding of how artworks reflect societal values, allowing oral responses, verbal explanations, or visual representations as alternatives to written output ensures equitable access to the learning objectives.
Section 504
Extended time on reflection activities and discussions that require students to analyze cultural or historical connections in artworks helps ensure full participation. Preferential seating during visual presentations or group critiques reduces distraction and supports focus when students are asked to observe and respond to artwork. Providing printed or digital copies of any visuals or discussion prompts displayed for the class ensures students can reference materials at their own pace.
ELL / MLL
Teachers should build vocabulary around key art and culture terms before students are asked to use them in discussion or written reflection, using visual examples and real artwork as anchors for meaning. Simple, clear directions paired with visual demonstrations help MLL students understand expectations for group and individual art-making activities. Where possible, encouraging students to draw on their own cultural backgrounds and, if available, home language resources to explore concepts of identity, group culture, and global issues enriches their engagement and affirms their experiences.
At Risk (RTI)
Connecting new art concepts to students' own communities, visual environments, and lived experiences provides accessible entry points into themes of cultural identity and societal values. Reducing the complexity of initial analysis tasks — such as focusing on one clear visual element or one cultural connection at a time — builds confidence before asking students to compare or contrast multiple artworks or perspectives. Structured discussion protocols and collaborative group formats give students the support of peer interaction while still engaging meaningfully with the unit's core ideas.
Gifted & Talented
Students who are ready for deeper engagement can investigate how specific artistic movements or individual artists have actively challenged or transformed societal values, moving beyond recognition to critical analysis of art as a tool for social or political change. Encouraging independent or small-group research into global issues such as climate change as represented across different artistic traditions and cultures allows for complex, interdisciplinary thinking. Students may also explore how their own collaborative artmaking choices reflect and communicate cultural identity at a conceptual level, examining the decisions behind the work rather than simply completing it.