Reading Art Across the Curriculum

Reading Art Across the Curriculum is a course from Focus 5, Inc that encourages the use artwork, especially portraits to develop literacy and critical thinking skills.  

Portraits are often viewed as a mere depiction of a person when in actuality they can be read as visual texts that communicate information without words. The goal of this approach is for teachers to learn how powerful portraits can be in the classroom, to feel more confident looking, thinking and talking about portraits, and to use artworks as a regular component of all instruction across the curriculum.

---

Resources

Reading Art Across the Curriculum includes nine elements that students can look for in artworks, four thinking questions and six sentence stems for talking about art.  

Introduction slide deck

Also available as Powerpoint and Keynote slides

Infographics

art reproductions

image bank

Lessons

These lessons break down instruction of the 9 elements we look for in art and then what we do once we know those things.

Facial Expression & Focal Point

Gesture & Clothing

Setting

Objects, Quantity, Size & Color

The Process: Using Art as Evidence When We Think and Talk

---

Music Videos

Artsintegration.net commissioned these videos to help teach the concepts of Reading Art Across the Curriculum

Lesson 1: Facial Expression & Focal Point

Hip Hop Version

Guitar Version

Lesson 3: Setting

Lesson 5: The Reading Art Process

Lesson 2: Gesture & Clothing

Lesson 4: Objects, Quantity, Size, Color