Unit 1 — Creating
Description
Students connect with multiple art movements, diverse artists, and varied cultural traditions. Upon exposure to these works, students generate ideas and create their own artwork. In media arts, students create visual representations that communicate, challenge, and express their own and others' ideas as both artist and audience. In visual arts, students demonstrate understanding of elements and principles governing the creation of visual artworks. Students develop skills in brainstorming, sketching, prototyping, and refining work through iterative practice and constructive critique.
Essential Questions
- What conditions, attitudes and behaviors support creativity and innovative thinking? What factors prevent or encourage people to take creative risks?
- How does collaboration expand the creative process? How does knowing art history and traditions help us create works of art and design?
- How do artists work? How do artists determine whether a direction in their work is effective, and how do they learn from trial and error?
- What role does persistence play in revising, refining and developing work? How do artists grow and become accomplished in art forms?
Learning Objectives
- Generate a variety of ideas, goals and solutions for media artworks using sketching, brainstorming, improvising, and prototyping
- Organize and design artistic ideas for media arts productions
- Critique plans, prototypes and production processes considering purposeful and expressive intent
- Conceptualize early stages of the creative process and overcome creative blocks
- Demonstrate persistence and willingness to experiment and take creative risks
- Demonstrate awareness of ethical responsibility in artmaking including environmental implications and intellectual property ethics
- Use criteria to examine, reflect on and plan revisions for artwork and create an artistic statement
Supplemental Resources
- Markers for exploring color and composition techniques
- Colored pencils for detailed artwork and refinement
- Sketch paper for brainstorming and prototyping ideas
- Chart paper for collaborative planning and idea generation
- Sticky notes for organizing and developing ideas visually
Music - Creating
Media Arts - Creating
Students apply mathematical thinking to art and design by measuring, calculating proportions, analyzing spatial relationships, and using geometric principles in composition and visual problem-solving.
Students investigate the properties of materials, color theory, light and optics, and sustainable practices in artmaking while developing scientific inquiry skills through experimental approaches to media and visual arts.
Students develop communication skills through critique, artistic statements, exhibition narratives, and analysis of visual texts. They practice reading and interpreting artworks, writing evaluative arguments, and engaging in discussions about aesthetic meaning and cultural perspectives.
Formative Assessments
- Group work and collaborative brainstorming sessions to generate new ideas and plans
- Teacher observation of students during sketching, prototyping, and experimental phases
- Question and answer discussions about creative decision-making and process
- Skill testing to assess proficiency with media tools and techniques
- Student self-reflection on creative process and willingness to take risks
Summative Assessment
Students complete tasks demonstrating understanding of elements and principles of art. Media arts assignments are assessed using digital rubrics on a learning management system. Visual arts tasks include identifying elements and principles from a variety of artworks and media, assessed using rubrics.
Benchmark Assessment
— not configured —
Alternative Assessment
Students may demonstrate understanding through a combination of visual responses, oral explanations of their artistic choices, and simplified sketches or collages in place of complex finished pieces. Visual supports such as labeled diagrams of art elements and principles, word banks, and sentence frames may be provided to support idea generation and critique participation.
IEP (Individualized Education Program)
Students with IEPs may benefit from having multi-step creative processes — such as brainstorming, sketching, and prototyping — broken into clearly sequenced steps with visual models showing what each stage looks like. Providing graphic organizers or visual planning templates can support idea generation and help students organize their artistic thinking before beginning a piece. Teachers should offer flexible output options, such as verbal explanation of creative choices or dictated artist statements, for students who face challenges with written expression. Frequent check-ins during studio work, along with specific and immediate feedback, will support persistence and help students navigate creative blocks.
Section 504
Students with 504 plans should be given extended time to complete iterative studio tasks, including sketching, revision, and final production phases, without penalty. Preferential seating in low-distraction areas of the studio space can help students maintain focus during brainstorming sessions and hands-on work. Printed or digitally accessible versions of directions and rubric criteria should be provided so students can reference expectations independently throughout the creative process.
ELL / MLL
Multilingual learners benefit from rich visual supports — such as labeled examples of art elements and principles, visual glossaries of studio vocabulary, and mentor artworks with annotations — to build content language alongside creative skills. Teachers should provide directions in clear, simple language and allow students to sketch, label, or demonstrate understanding of their creative decisions in ways that reduce language barriers. Encouraging students to draw on their own cultural traditions and visual references as source material for idea generation can deepen engagement and make the creative process more personally meaningful.
At Risk (RTI)
Students who struggle to engage with open-ended creative tasks may benefit from structured entry points, such as a limited set of starting prompts or partially completed idea maps, that make brainstorming feel manageable rather than overwhelming. Connecting new art concepts to familiar images, experiences, or visual media from students' everyday lives can help build the background knowledge needed to generate original ideas. Breaking the creative cycle into smaller, celebrated milestones — such as completing a thumbnail sketch or successfully using a new tool — can build confidence and reinforce the habit of experimentation.
Gifted & Talented
Gifted students should be encouraged to explore the conceptual and ethical dimensions of artmaking at greater depth, such as independently researching intellectual property issues in contemporary media arts or investigating how specific art movements responded to their social and cultural contexts. These students may be well served by taking on more complex design challenges that require them to synthesize multiple elements and principles in service of a sophisticated expressive intent, or by pursuing self-directed projects that push beyond the standard scope of studio tasks. Opportunities to engage in peer critique leadership, mentor younger students' creative thinking, or connect their work to real-world audiences and purposes can provide meaningful extension without simply adding more of the same work.