When art classes are short and infrequent, it is always a challenge to meet required state and national standards. A unit comparing and contrasting Peter Max's Pop art portraits with the realistic style of Gilbert Stuart's presidential portraits provides an opportunity to address a huge number of these requirements. Focus can change with the age…

When the author asks her students to illustrate different types of weather, invariably their paintings look like nonobjective artwork: Winter often becomes one snowman with hundreds of asterisk snowflakes scattered throughout the picture. Spring? A rainbow with smiley-faced suns. So, in what direction could the author lead her students that would…

The Day of the Dead project is absolutely one of the author's favorite lessons. It's easy enough for almost any grade level--the author does it with her second-graders--yet can be detailed enough to keep eighth-graders interested. It uses a limited number of easy-to-acquire supplies, which is great for tight budgets. It can also be easily broken…

The study of the beautiful monarch butterfly lends itself to a vast array of subject matter, and offers the opportunity to meet a large and varied number of standards and objectives for many grade levels. Art projects featuring monarchs may include many cross-curricular units such as math (symmetry and number graphing), science (adaptation and…