Lesson Plans and Pre-visit Guides

Current search results within: Theme, Artist Choices

• 19th-Century European Painting (Pre-visit Guide)PDF

  Introduce students to the range of artistic styles that developed in response to a period of profound social, political, and cultural transformation, including Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and Impressionism. Use this guide's collection overview, gallery map, tour-planning guidelines, discussion questions, suggested works of art, and resource list to make the most of your trip to the Museum.

• Art of the American Wing (Pre-visit Guide)PDF

  Introduce students to American art from the early colonial period through World War I. Use this guide's collection overview, gallery maps, tour-planning guidelines, recommendations for engaging students with works of art in the galleries, and suggested works of art to make the most of your trip to the Museum.

• Art of the Americas (Pre-visit Guide)PDF

  Introduce students to the roots of civilization in the ancient Americas through Precolumbian art created mainly for ceremonial and ritual purposes. Use this guide's collection overview, gallery map, tour-planning guidelines, themes to consider, discussion questions, suggested works of art, and resource list to make the most of your trip to the Museum.

• Beyond the Figure (Lesson Plan)

  Consider how artists convey personality in nonfigural portraits and the relationship between visual and verbal expression by looking at a painting by Charles Demuth in the Museum's Modern and Contemporary galleries and through a portrait-making activity in the classroom.

• Composing a Landscape (Lesson Plan)

  Study the relationship between the human and natural worlds in art, as well as the techniques artists use to convey ideas, by exploring a painting by Frederic Edwin Church in the Museum's American Wing. Extend the lesson through a writing and drawing activity in the classroom, or a sketching activity outdoors.

• European Paintings (Pre-visit Guide)PDF

  Introduce students to depictions of the classical world, genre works, landscapes, and still lifes created amid the religious, political, and intellectual shifts in Renaissance through the eighteenth-century Europe. Use this guide's collection overview, gallery map, tour-planning guidelines, discussion questions, suggested works of art, and resource list to make the most of your trip to the Museum.

• Geometric Design in Islamic Art (Lesson Plan)

  Students will be able to use a compass and straightedge to construct regular polygons; and recognize ways works of art from the Islamic world utilize geometric forms and relationships.

• Manet—Critics and Champions (Lesson Plan)

  Exercise students' sensory and descriptive powers in the Museum or the classroom with an imaginative activity and viewing questions focused on a painting by Édouard Manet. Examine the ways artists are inspired by the past and help students understand the context of Manet's career.

• Modern and Contemporary Art (Pre-visit Guide)PDF

  Introduce students to the effects that industrialization, mechanization, and massive population shifts to cities had on art, as well as the rise of abstraction, formalism, and art that employs new media and technologies. Use this guide's collection overview, gallery map, tour-planning guidelines, themes to consider, discussion questions, suggested works of art, and resource list to make the most of your trip to the Museum.

• The Arts of Japan (Pre-visit Guide)PDF

  Introduce students to the range of styles, formats, and subjects that have characterized Japanese art over the centuries. Use this guide's collection and gallery overviews, tour-planning tips, recommendations for engaging students, suggested themes and works of art, and list of resources to make the most of your visit to the Museum.