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Join the largest creative community established exclusively for visual arts educators, university professors, researchers and scholars, teaching artists, administrators, and art museum educators.
Join NAEA Renew MembershipLesson Planning
Includes thematic lesson plans, activities, materials, themes and artists.
Instructional Resources Gallery: A special collection of lesson/unit plans curated by NAEA professionals and available only to NAEA members!
CLICK HERE to view the Instructional Resources Gallery
CLICK HERE to learn how to submit your lesson/unit plan for inclusion in the Instructional Resources Gallery
Museum Education Resources: Art museums provide a wide array of web-based resources for K-12 teachers. These include lesson plans, timelines, searchable databases, image banks, video clips of artists and scholars speaking about works of art, access to behind the scenes images of exhibition installations, podcasts of lectures, interactive games, special teacher blogs, free subscriptions to e-resources, and much more.
Click here for a list of resources from forty-five art museums across the country, organized alphabetically by museum. Additional museum listings will be added periodically.
NAEA Standards. These Standards represent the professional judgment of the art education field about the characteristics of preparation programs that will enable all visual arts educators to provide high-quality art instruction for every student. This collection consists of the Professional Standards for Visual Arts Educators; National Visual Arts Standards; Standards for Art Teacher Preparation; Purposes, Principles, and Standards for School Art Programs; and Design Standards for School Art Facilities.
"25 Places for Kids to Learn and Experiment with Art"
From Karen Schweitzer. This document contains a list of sites that teach art history and theory, sites that offer easy-to use tools for mess-free creations, and sites that provide interactive games and activities.
AMACO® Lesson Plans. The AMACO® series of lesson plans, technique sheets and Power Point presentations cover a wide range of topics and offer art teachers an excellent starting point for creating memorable lessons that incorporate art history with hands-on classroom activities. Listed below are the available lesson plans, technique sheets and Power Point presentations from AMACO®. AMACO provides supplies for pottery, education & crafts.
Art:21 Online Lesson Library 
(Seasons 1-3) is a doorway to curricular resources presenting contemporary art and artists for the classroom, hosting a wide range of thematic lesson plans for Visual and Performing Arts, Language Arts, and Social Studies curricula. Educators are encouraged to select the activities, materials, and ideas that meet their individual interests—an entire thematic unit of study, a particular hands-on project, or questions to foster dialogue. The topics provide focused ideas that cut across series themes (Place, Stories, etc.) and all of the artists featured in the broadcast. Each topic includes a range of lessons that connect current issues, ideas, and events with an exploration of the diverse perspectives of contemporary artists.
artsonia is the largest student art museum in the world! Our dream is that every child will have an online art gallery, preserving their masterpieces for all time!
ARTSEDGE—the National Arts and Education Network—supports the placement of the arts at the center of the curriculum and advocates creative use of technology to enhance the K-12 educational experience. ARTSEDGE empowers educators to teach in, through, and about the arts by providing the tools to develop interdisciplinary curricula that fully integrate the arts with other academic subjects. ARTSEDGE offers free, standards-based teaching materials for use in and out of the classroom, as well as professional development resources, student materials, and guidelines for arts-based instruction and assessment. Transform your teaching with arts-integrated resources for the K-12 classroom!
Common Core and the Arts Resources (Arts Education Partnership). The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a state-led initiative to ensure that students leave school with the knowledge and skills required to succeed in college and in their careers. The resulting changes to the expectations of arts educators can be profound. AEP is providing this (ever-growing) selection of resources to help AEP Partner Organizations, arts educators, school leaders, and policymakers develop a better understanding of the Common Core and what the movement means for the arts.
Crayola Champion Creatively Alive Children™ Professional Resources. Download free professional development resources! The Champion Creatively Alive Children series will help you implement arts-infused education in your school. Like you, Crayola knows that arts-infused education helps children acquire critical 21st century skills: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication. The complete program includes 5 videos and guides, along with a supplemental introductory leadership guide, and additional resources to help you facilitate workshops and arts-infused education advocacy meetings--everything you need from PowerPoint presentations to flyers, handouts and evaluation forms. These resources will help transform your school culture, and infuse arts across your curriculum.
Download this introduction guide to learn more.
• Introductory Leadership Guide
• Bibliography Handout
• Preview or Download Training Modules on Creativity, Critical Thinking, Collaboration, Communication, and Arts-Infused Advocacy
Additional Arts-Infused Education Resources:
• Reinvesting in Arts Education
• Principal Journal - Champion Creatively Alive Children
Creativity Resource for Teachers from the Denver Art Museum. Free online resource for teachers nationwide. Quick facts about the site:
• Launched in January 2012, this free website provides more than 600 adaptable lesson plans written by teachers for over 130 objects from the museum’s world-class art collection.
• Developed by the Denver Art Museum in collaboration with teachers. Lesson plans and resources focus on inspiring students to think and problem-solve creatively.
• Organized in an easy way so that teachers can pick the topic they’d like to explore or enhance, then learn how to integrate art into that subject.
• Includes professional and student development tools such as webinars, virtual classroom courses, career videos, educator blogs and creativity tools.
• Easy for teachers in language arts, social studies and visual arts to provide a curriculum rooted in the arts while also meeting 21st Century Skills.
For kids: A creative and cool class gift. See how NAEA member, Jim Boland, art teacher at Spoede Elementary School in St. Louis, Missouri, worked with fifth-graders to design and create memorable permanent art projects such as benches and totem poles as gifts to the school.
Developed for the Getty Education Institute for the K-12 art education community. It features lesson plans & curriculum ideas, search & index, artsednet talk and more.
From the Incredible Art Department, an art education website for art students, parents, teachers, home schoolers and administrators. See an extensive list of art lessons, news, resources, and much more.
New Horizons for Learning. You will find information on some of the best researched and the most widely implemented methods of helping all students to learn more successfully. The information includes a description of how the teaching and learning strategies work, where they have been applied, results, and where to find further information from experts in the field, books, websites, and other resources.
Lesson Plans and Resources for Arts Integration from Edutopia
The New York Times: Learning Network is a free service that offers a large amount of information, especially on teaching resources. This website is aimed at students in grades 3-12, their teachers, and parents.
Developing an Arts Assessment: Some Selected Strategies. Use the NAEP arts assessment and field test as a case study to explore useful strategies for developing an arts performance assessment.
Resources for Kid Artists. Kids love art. They love to see it, experience it, and create it. Engaging kids in art education at an early age has been proven to have a profound impact on the way they learn and how they view the world. Introducing kids to art when they are young teaches valuable thinking skills that improve their comprehension and performance in other subjects like math and science.
Art Educator Links
Engage with May's Mentor through the NAEA blog!
Renee Sandell, PhD
Recently named 2013 National Art Educator of the Year, Dr. Renee Sandell is Professor of Art Education at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia where she developed and directed Graduate Art Education Programs from 2004-2009. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Art Education from The Ohio State University. Her research and teaching interests include visual literacy, museum education, gender issues, studio pedagogy, art and healing, and the professional development of teachers. Co-author of two books on gender issues in art education, Renee Sandell has published numerous articles, book chapters and designed elementary and middle school art curricula.