Amazingly Great Web Sites for Teaching Artists
Amazingly Great Web Sites for Teaching Artists
Recommended by Sabrina Klein, TAO Acting Director
Warning-these sites are absolutely addictive and you could lose (no, invest!) hours spelunking.
It’s hard to beat the Kennedy Center’s site for easy to replicate lesson plans across art forms and for all grades. If you can’t find an exact match, you can nonetheless mine the site for activities to spur your own lesson plan ideas. Be sure to browse the “look-listen-learn” options as well. Some of the best stuff is hidden under layers of browsing, so give yourself time to explore the Kennedy Center site.
Probably my all time favorite resource, if I had to choose just one: the Library of Congress has fabulous source material and teachers guides, lesson plans, reflection templates, all online for teachers, including hundreds of thousands of historical photos, digital copies of original letters and documents, and illustrated essays from throughout American history. Library of Congress site.
Teachers’ Domain: Digital Media for the Classroom and Professional Development is a gift from WGBH Educational Foundation (yes, the PBS station out of Boston). While resources in the arts are relatively slim, there are marvelous video clips for many things often outside our comfort zone (mathematics, science) and very rich in English Language arts and literacy. You need to set up an account, which is free, and will get periodic newsletters to remind you to check out new material. Teachers’ Domain site.
The National Endowment for the Humanities Picturing America program is used by hundreds of schools who participate by displaying full color, beautiful reproductions of American art. The website has amazingly galleries online, many of which you can download but which better on the screen if you can project them in a classroom or at a training. Or just review the themes and prompts yourself to find good teaching ideas. Browsing the Image Gallery is a blast, with some surprising gems.NEH Picturing America site.
Local PBS station KQED’s Spark program captures a diverse array of local artists on video, many with accompanying study guides. Find live performances and get background information on almost any art form you can think of, and many you’ve never heard of. If you love what you see on line, you can get a DVD to use over and over again , or stream it from the Internet into any classroom you visit. KQED site.
Museums all over the country have fabulous collections online, along with thematic strands and lesson plans. Many of the lesson plans are relatively conservative and can be uninspired, but others are really striking and provoke great thinking on the part of a teaching artist. My favorites include:
SF MOMA, especially ArtThink, but also don’t miss the interactive slides shows on Frida Kahlo, Jackson Pollock and others, with student activities to make their own inspired works of art. (If you start from the SFMOMA home page, you need to click on “Explore Modern Art” to get to the educators page.) SF MOMA site.
The Getty Museum. The kids interactive games are fun, too. The Getty,
The deYoung Museum has a cool image database, and some slide shows with narrative that are a bit like higher quality filmstrips some of us remember from elementary school. The deYoung site.
Find more recommended museum websites at Teachers Count. Select best museum websites or education blogs or music education sites or general lesson plans websites….lots of “bests” that teachers should know about. I didn’t love all their recommendations in all their categories, but the museum recommendations were pretty darn good. Teachers Count site.
Creative Glossary is fun for exploring vocabulary in realms in which you are less experienced — quilting, culinary arts, carpets and rugs, fashion— and has provoked interesting exchanges about definitions and meaning. Also good if looking for definitions to help teachers understand what you’re talking about artistically. Creative Glossaary site.
I’m a little reluctant to recommend this last set of sites, just because you could spend the rest of your life investigating them, but I’d be derelict in my duties if I didn’t point you toward the Smithsonian museum sites. Start at and plan to get caught up in slide shows from the National Portrait Gallery showing “Women of Our Time,” or The National Museum of the American Indian on the Code Talker soldiers of WWII. Other Smithsonian sites include the American History Museum, the American Art Museum and the Museum of African Art, each with its own education activities. Smithsonian sites.
