Lesson Plan: Making Peace

One of the featured works,
The Fighter of the Spirit

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA) has a plethora of resources for teachers. I've written about the museum before, but not their online presence. The MIA loves teachers and creates so much content for educators to use for free. Each month, they post a short lesson plan about a particular subject or work of art. The current feature is Making Peace; it highlights five pieces from the MIA's collection, and has a activities to go along with the lesson. It's like getting a one-on-one tour and discussion.

Perfect for your self-motivated, tech savy students. You could go through the whole lesson at once, or look at one piece each day for a themed week. The cool part about this, if you're local to Minnesota, is that your kids can read about the art and then actually go see it in person! You can stand in front of this statue, realizing how huge it is, noticing the little details that you can't see in a small image on a computer screen. You could make a scavenger hunt out of finding all five works in the museum, or call ahead for a tour related to the subject.

If you want to get the MIA's Teaching the Arts e-mail newsletter, you can sign up here. (scroll down a bit and you'll see the different newsletters you can subscribe to)