A big thanks to @NMHS_Principal for sharing this resource on twitter.

Kits can include any of the following:

• Animations
• Audio Clips
• Documents
• Illustrations
• Photos
• Video Clips

Examples of some of the visual art topics are located below.

Email from Hillary to Theresa (Labor day weekend 2008): “What do you think about starting a blog where we can post all our classroom management stuff ?”

Yea, we’ve come a long way since that email. Our primary goal was to favor quality over quantity (which also coincidentally matches our teaching styles).

So, we started with classroom management, music + art integration, and product reviews. It was a great focus (and we still try and discuss these topics often), yet we expanded even further. We invited YOU to join us. (Thank you to everyone who has been a guest author!!) We added lots of web 2.0 tools, advocated for the arts, and added things just cool and creative.

We have also expanded our readership (thank you everyone!). Our email subscriptions doubled over the summer. Therefore, since many of our new readers missed our infant stages (which we still think are useful), we decided to celebrate our 1st birthday with a few of our favorites from the archives:

Theresa’s personal favorites:
The Clean-Up Map – Inspired by Dora the Explorer (yes, kids CAN follow directions!?!)

Photography as Art and History – Just love the contrast in music and imagery over this 100 year span.

Hillary’s personal favorites:
The Magic Pocket Name – Love how this simple technique can be so effective in the art room!

American Revolution Portraitist – It’s exciting to make connections between American history, art and music.

Brooklyn Bridge, 1899

Brooklyn Bridge, 2007

Photography is one of my favorite forms of artistic expression. In addition to artistic merit, I am particularly interested in photographs that document life from long ago.

Compare the photo found on Histografica of the Brooklyn Bridge from 1899 to a recent image photographed in 2007. Almost the same point of view, yet a completely different scene.
Add an additional element to the scene – pop culture. Use the widgets below to listen to popular music from each of these eras.

Possible Discussion Questions:

1. How has this scene changed over the last 100 years?
2. How has photography changed over the last 100 years?
3. What type of person traveled the Brooklyn Bridge in each scene? How were lives different? The same? How might social interactions be different?
4. Listen to popular music from each era (preview songs to determine if appropriate for your students). How does this help you understand time and place? Does the music make you feel any different about the images? What if you played music from the 1899 with the photograph from 2007, does it fit?

Unfinished George Washington by Stuart (appears on $1 bill)

You may not realize it, but you see a portrait painted by Gilbert Stuart practically every day. His George Washington portrait has appeared on the U.S. one-dollar bill for more than 100 years! He’s probably the most famous portraitist of the American Revolution with a portfolio that includes most of the Founding Fathers – Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, etc.

According to Wikipedia, his works can be found today at art museums throughout the United States and Great Britain, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

According to the National Gallery of Art, because he portrayed virtually all the notable men and women of the Federal period in the United States, Gilbert Stuart was declared the “Father of American Portraiture” by his contemporaries.

Famous portraits by Stuart - Washington, Adams, Jefferson

To integrate music, below are mp3 clips from the album “Music of the American Revolution: The Birth of Liberty.” According to the New World Records website, this album “is a scholarly and well-programmed musical recreation of a defining moment in the nation’s history, mixing propaganda songs, psalmody, fife-and-drum music, and wind band music, the four types of music most prevalent and popular at the time.”

“The pieces on this disc have been chosen to illustrate some of the different kinds of music sung and played in the Colonies around the time of the Revolution. Sources for the music and texts of the pieces recorded are original wherever possible. No attempt has been made to recapture the untutored roughness with which much of the music was surely performed in its time. Rather, the goal has been to record polished performances by skilled singers and players,” reads the liner notes of the album.

If you’re planning to teach a lesson on portraits, consider referencing Gilbert Stuart. For added resource, below is a presentation by Martin Kalfatovic, a libraries coordinator and head of new media at the Smithsonian.