Arts & Literature Resources

Art

Art Access
This Web site from the Art Institute of Chicago examines objects from the museum's permanent collection to provide site visitors with an understanding of the collection’s content, style, and historical context. It has Ancient Indian and African-American art, impressionism, post-impressionism, and modern art as well as a variety of online resources for teachers, parents and students, including lesson plans for the classroom and art projects for the home.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/artaccess/

Artcyclopedia
Part portal and part collection of articles about famous paintings and painters, the Artcyclopedia site indexes over a thousand museum and fine-arts-related sites from around the world, providing access to the most authoritative sites on the Internet. The site's "Top 30" feature provides the 30 most popular artists and 30 most popular works of art searched by users of the site. Has a glossary with hundreds of fine arts terms.
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/

ARTSEDGE
An excellent source of information on arts education, ARTSEDGE provides arts curriculum resources; look-listen-learn lessons; standards in dance, music, theater, and the visual arts; articles about how to teach the arts, and articles and reports on current issues in arts education. Developed by the Kennedy Center and the National Endowment for the Arts.
http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/

A Century of Drawing
This site presents 50 of the 140 drawings on view in the "A Century of Drawing" exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibit charts the development of modern art and shows some of the most aesthetically compelling and intellectually intriguing works from the 20th century. The Web site includes works by Picasso, Klee, Matisse, Calder, Rothko, de Kooning, Dubuffet, Guston, Rauschenberg, Twombly, and others.
http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/drawinginfo.htm

The Drama Teacher's Resource Room
This Web site is dedicated to drama teachers (grades 4-12) and includes a variety of resources: lesson plans, backstage activities/archives, production ideas, other drama links, and educator seminar information.
http://www.sasktelwebsite.net/erachi/index.html

Education at the Getty
Discover an interdisciplinary approach to using the Internet to help bring Los Angeles's worlds of art into the classroom. Teachers outside of Los Angeles can also use the lesson plans and resources to build connections between art learning and the art worlds of their own communities. The site offers lesson plans and curriculum ideas, image galleries, and discussion boards.
http://www.getty.edu/education/

Guggenheim Museum
Learning Through Art is an artists-in-the-schools program of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The program encourages teachers and teaching artists to design art projects that support student learning across the curriculum.
http://www.learningthroughart.org/

Joy2Learn
This Web site features e-presentations with internationally renowned artists. Each artist introduces his or her art form, discussing its history, background, and personal insights. Students can navigate through videos including performances, discussions, and quiz games. The Joy2Learn e-presentations were designed to support curriculum standards in areas of social studies, science, the arts, and English language arts and may also be used by general education teachers of elementary or middle schools class levels. 
http://joy2learn.com/

KinderArt, Art Lessons for K-12
This site boasts over 1000 free art lesson plans, covering art topics from architecture to drama, and folk art to sculpture. Also included are a free newsletter, an art gallery of children's art, profiles of young artists, information about contests for students, and many materials for purchase.
http://www.kinderart.com/index.html

Metropolitan Museum of Art
This site includes Explore and Learn (an area about artists and their works), Timeline of Art History, Educational Resources, and Museumkids (activities for kids to try). 
http://www.metmuseum.org/home.asp

PapaInk
This Web site is an international online gallery of children's art. The creators of the site provide no-cost archival services to organizations and individuals all over the world, enabling the set-up and building out of permanent galleries of children's art -- a great service with amazing images.
http://www.papaink.org/gallery/home/index.html

Smithsonian National Museum of African Art
The "What's New" link from the home page leads to five specialized interfaces of the museum's collections: diversity, uses, imagery, currently on view, and advanced.
http://africa.si.edu/index1.html

Music

Essentials of Music
This site for basic information about classical music  (created in cooperation with W.W. Norton, built around Essential Classics) includes overviews of the six main periods in music history (Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Twentieth Century); brief biographies of nearly 70 composers; and a glossary containing 200 definitions with numerous musical examples. RealAudio is required for sound clips.
http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/

San Francisco Symphony Kids' Site
The site offers a refresher course on The Instruments of the Orchestra and or an introduction to reading music in Meet the Notes.
http://www.sfskids.org/templates/splash.asp

Research

Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum conducted a three-year study to evaluate the impact of arts education on critical thinking skills and literacy among elementary school children. The study found that students in the program performed better in several categories of literacy and critical thinking skills — including extended focus, hypothesizing, and providing multiple interpretations — than did students who were not in the program.
http://www.learningthroughart.org/research_findings.php

Writing & Literature

Guide to Grammar and Writing
Whether it's run-on sentences, modifiers, punctuation, spelling rules, or essay writing, if you have a grammar or writing question, you can probably find the answer here.
http://www.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/

International Children's Digital Library
The goal of this 5-year project is to create a digital library of international children's books for children ages 3-13, building an international collection that reflects both the diversity and quality of children's literature. The collection includes over 700 titles, all available for free. The ICDL is a public library for the world, and the collection reflects diverse cultures, perspectives, and historical periods. The ICDL searching and reading tools are now available in 9 languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Filipino/Tagalog, German, Hebrew, Persian/Farsi, and Spanish.
http://www.icdlbooks.org/

Media Literacy
The site provides background information and teaching materials on media literacy -- accessing, analyzing, evaluating, and creating media. Resources include a "how-to" program for teaching media literacy skills to K-5 students, with replicable structure, tools, and lesson plans; a downloadable classroom activity guide that provides 25 lesson plans for K-12 media literacy; over 350 online magazine articles; and a media literacy kit with materials for free and for sale, in English and in Spanish.
http://www.medialit.org/

PBS TeacherSource: Arts & Literature
Use the pull-down menus in the center of the page for access to hundreds of PreK-12 curriculum resources. Lessons are based upon PBS's on-air and online programming. Most lessons incorporate the use of video, but do not require it. The site also provides access to dozens of recommended arts and literature Web sites and books.
http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/arts_lit.htm

Perseus Digital Library
This site, produced by members of Tufts University's Classics Department, provides visitors with a wealth of information about the classical Western world. It includes an atlas, encyclopedia, introductory essays to ancient Greek and Roman life, English-to-Greek and English-to-Latin dictionaries, classic texts, and images of art and archaeology. Of special interest are the site's collection of electronic texts of Greek and Latin literature (from Aeschylus and Aristotle to Sophocles and Xenophon), The Bible, and the English Renaissance (Shakespeare, Philip Marlowe, and others).
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

Poets & Poetry Video Biographies
Annenberg Media's "Voices & Visions" is a great way to learn about the most influential American poets and poetry. Hour-long biographies highlight the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, and nine other renowned poets.
http://www.learner.org/resources/series57.html

See the "Spotlight on Voices & Visions" Web site for brief videoclips from the series and links to extend the learning.
http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/



Updated June 2006.