Students will read writings by Ralph Waldo Emerson and discuss the principles of transcendentalism. They will then discuss a landscape photograph by Carleton Watkins and use pinhole cameras to create photographic essays depicting a modern-day environmental issue.

Students pair Dorothea Lange's photographs with passages from John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath. Students create an oral group presentation and discuss the relationship between the images and text.

Light painting is a creative activity that involves creating striking images and illusions using a camera, a light source, and a little practice. Light paintings may be literal representations or impressionistic, color-filled images. When the camera shutter is open (and the room is dark) the film or digital sensor acts like a blank canvas onto which learners "paint" with a flashlight.

Students get the inside scoop on a story when they create interview questions and answers for characters in the books they read.

In this lesson students perform a line dance to reinforce story telling through movement.

Students will compare the daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe by an unknown photographer with Poe's writings in an effort to discover the character of this mysterious author.

Students explore the theme of love of war through texts on camaraderie among soldiers. They then compose a visual collage depicting their beliefs about the relationship between love and war.

Students will compare portrayals of individual soldiers to depictions of battle scenes, write two articles representing two different perspectives about a current war, and manipulate a photograph to alter its mood.

Students will compare and contrast artworks depicting different viewpoints about war and will write captions that describe works of art in different media. They will also manipulate the image depicted in a photograph of a war in recent history.

Invite students to share and discuss a song of their choice with lyrics that contain a social, political or cultural message relevant to a contemporary social justice issue. Students will lead their peers through a close reading and discussion of the song’s lyrics, and create a written analysis of the song, its lyrics, and its message. To help anchor their analysis, teachers may use the Critical Literacy Text-Dependent Question Stems template in the lesson. Students can organize their writing along the eight areas, while choosing from the list of prompts in each area. (Note: Teacher discretion will be necessary for handling lyrics that use explicit language.) Use the suggested activity and strategies below to empower students to lead the lesson with their peers as the students.

Students will whistle while they work on this lesson, creating a photomontage movie of their interpretation of a favorite song's lyrics that will end everyone's day on a high note.

Students study how artists of the Neoclassical period were influenced by major historical events during the Enlightenment. They will identify and analyze the Neoclassical style.

Do art and math have anything in common? How do artists and architects use math to create their works? In these lessons, students will explore the intersection of math and art in the works of two artists and one architect for whom mathematical concepts (lines, angles, two-dimensional shapes and three-dimensional polyhedra, fractions, ratios, and permutations) and geometric forms were fundamental.

"Opening the World through Journaling: Integrating Art, Science, and Language Arts" teaches children to become keen observers of the natural world by drawing and writing about the plants and animals in situ. In a set of nested exercises, students use games to gain confidence in drawing and writing as a way to gather information. Later, they employ these skills to put together a field guide, make treasure maps, and to write short stories and poems.

The Play Make Learn Conference is a place for collaboration and discovery in the design, research and practice of playful learning, games for learning and positive social impact, making and makerspaces, STEAM education, and arts in education. PML creates an inspirational space for preK-12 educators, designers, developers, innovators, librarians, museum professionals, makers, and researchers to tinker together, share knowledge, and celebrate one another’s work.

Lila Gray instills her own love of poetry in her students by encouraging them to write original works and finding poems that express who they are. Her weekly open mic sessions create a perfect venue for building confidence and helping students find their voice while still hitting core standards and learning lifelong skills.

Students will compare propagandistic strategies in artworks to modern-day examples of persuasive techniques and create a propaganda poster for a current political leader.

Students will examine the influence of Greek and Roman mythology on art, discuss strategies of propaganda in an ancient portrait and a 17th-century cabinet, and create a campaign poster for a classroom candidate that uses Greek or Roman iconography.

Make connections between Dorothea Lange's images and the history of the Dust Bowl, the Depression, World War II, and large-scale agriculture in the United States. Students learn about the role of photography in news stories and write their own news story.

Percussionist Steven Angel has developed an innovative program that uses rhythm to help struggling students improve their reading fluency and comprehension. Deceptively simple -- a facilitator taps out a basic rhythm while students read aloud -- the method relaxes students, helps them focus, and is effective in after-school intervention programs as well as traditional classrooms.