Lesson Plans

Through careful looking and reading a painting for information, students will better understand the journey out to California via the Isthmus of Panama during the California Gold Rush.

Students will learn about warm and cool-colors and understand how artwork can portray common experiences. Students will learn how to write a short narrative using setting, characters, objects, and events based on an artwork.

Students will learn about Jeremy Anderson's fantasy / art map, will create a fantasy / art map, based on Sacramento, explore other visual maps, and students will develop a definition for a map, which is broad enough to include fantasy / art and visual maps.

Small groups of students will first speculate on a chronology for these three selected paintings. Then each group will explore one of these three paintings, looking closely at the artwork, discussing it and finding out about the artist and its context. Students next speculate about what the painting tells about the past and how people lived at this time. After small groups present what they discovered and speculated, class as a whole returns to the original speculated chronology and corrects it if needed. To conclude lesson, each student selects two of the three artworks about which to write. Each student will compare and contrast and reveal what each tells the viewer about the past and how people lived at that time.

Students will examine two landscape paintings by John Horace Hooper and Lewis Cohen and compare the artists’ portrayal of the natural world and people interacting with it.  Students will participate in a game that simulates society’s use of renewable and nonrenewable resources and identify renewable and nonrenewable resources portrayed in the focus artworks.

Students make descriptive observations about a still-life. Using primary and secondary-colors, they make their own still-life.

Students will analyze how photographers depicted the effects of the Depression on Dust Bowl refugees in the United States during the late 1930s.

Students will gain a perceptive of how different California was during the Gold Rush and how the residents of San Francisco coped with the growing population and changing economy.

Students will learn how the differences between Indian and British cultural perspectives, as seen in works of art, reinforced the British policy of imperialism in India.

Students will learn the technique of writing dialogue to explain a character. Students will learn about the visual art element of form.

Students will analyze how photographers depicted the effects of the Depression on Dust Bowl refugees in the United States during the late 1930s.

Students will have an opportunity to refine their use of expository writing.

Students will learn how an artist can use personal images, symbols and contemporary references to address both universal and specific social and political issues in a pluralistic society, and put that learning into practice by creating a work of art themselves.

Analyze how the Counter Reformation revitalized the Catholic Church and the forces that fostered the movement.

Students explore the oldest form of the written language by creating their own system of Symbols to communicate.

Describe the contributions of France and other nations and of individuals to the outcome of the Revolution. Identify the different roles women played during the Revolution. Understand the personal impact and economic hardship of the war on families, problems of financing the war, wartime inflation, and laws against hoarding goods and materials and profiteering.

Students will characterize how technology and current events influenced the way in which artists worked. Students will learn how Romantics, Realists, and Impressionists reacted against the traditional Academy in their break from Classicism.

Students will learn that Buddhism adapted to the indigenous religions of the countries, into which it was introduced.

Students will compare various artists’ interpretation of the Abraham and Isaac story.  They will create artwork based on other key figures in the history of the Jewish religion (i.e. Moses, Naomi, Ruth, or David) or on an important story from another ancient culture they have studied.

Students will learn how the cultural values of England , which are reflected in art of the period, contributed to the Industrial Revolution in England.

Students will gain an outsider’s perspective of California before it became a part of the Union.

Students will improve their understanding of algebraic expressions. This lesson is intended to supplement and reinforce existing math curriculum for the corresponding reporting clusters for California CST and STAR testing. Students will gain an understanding of Pop Art, shape, form, space, value, and shading.

Students will improve their understanding of algebraic expressions. This lesson is intended to supplement and reinforce existing math curriculum for the corresponding reporting clusters for California CST and STAR testing. Students will gain an understanding of 16th century Italian art techniques, perspective, the use of a grid to enlarge an image, shading, texture, and volume.

Students will improve their understanding of fractions and decimals. This lesson is intended to supplement and reinforce existing math curriculum for the corresponding reporting clusters for California CST and STAR testing. Students will gain an understanding of Pop Art and the use of shapes in art.