Integrating Art into the Gifted
classroom
                                                    By Megan Sheeley



"There is virtually no problem you cannot solve, no goal you cannot achieve, no obstacle you cannot overcome if
you know how to apply the creative powers of your mind, like a laser beam, to cut through every difficulty in your life
and your work.”

Why is integrating art important?

Studies have shown that the arts can significantly advance gifted students’ academic and creative abilities, as well as
cognitive functioning.  Teachers can design experiences that are tied to the unique needs, interests, and abilities of
gifted students and challenge them to perform more complex and sophisticated tasks.  

        Addresses multiple intelligences
        Explores highest levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy
        Works as a strong motivational tool
        Presents the concept that sometimes there is no clear right or wrong answer
        Encourages the concept that not everything has to be perfect to be beautiful

How can I do it?

You don't have to be a special kind of person to be creative – everyone can do it. It's not about who you are, it's
about what you do. You just need to start looking for multiple solutions rather than settling for just one, and give
yourself permission to be playful and inquisitive, flexible and versatile.

        Be confident in your own creativity
        Have fun with planning and implementing your lessons and presentations
        Add artistic elements to ordinary academic projects
        Require students to display their understanding in different ways…complete different products
        Use rubrics for grading different objectives and aspects of the products
        Involve students in the evaluation process

The key is establishing clear goals before designing the learning experience.

Examples of Art-Integrated Projects:

Language Arts Learning Goals
The arts can strengthen all areas of oral and written communication and, for gifted students, provide more
opportunities for creative problem-solving and analytical thinking.
Reading
•        Enhance critical thinking. While reading a story, students draw, sketch, or paint whatever is most vivid to them.
It could be a color, a mood, an image, a symbol, a scene, or an idea. In small groups, they discuss their artwork and
its significance to the story, and what they think will happen by the end.
•        Stimulate analytical thinking and imaginative interpretation. Work with the children to create a chamber theater
piece out of a short story. Ask them to select the most important scenes and explain why they chose them. Choose
students to be narrators and others to speak and act the parts of the characters.
•        Sharpen awareness of motivation and points of view. Children choose a conflict, issue, or problem raised by
the text and stage a debate, with different students assuming the role of specific characters.
Writing
•        Stimulate novel ideas for stories. Provide visual catalysts (e.g., paintings, photographs) for students to imagine
what happened before and after the scenes depicted. Use the visual image as the climactic moment of a story, the
moment after the climax, or the moment before.
•        Undertake investigative research. Children read a story of a painting that disappeared and imagine how they-
the art detectives-tracked it down. Or they can write a fictional piece on how they discovered a painting and exposed
the forgeries. What gave it away?
•        Explore multiple points of view. As an extension of the previous activity, the students could write historical
fiction on the extraordinary journey of the Mona Lisa from King Louis XIV's palace in Versailles to its permanent
home in the Louvre. (They could also choose another famous art piece.) They could write it from the point of view of
the painting, the people who had it, or the people who were looking for it.
•        Synthesize different sources for a news story. Drawing on a variety of sources (photographs, paintings, music,
and written material), children write a sketch, poem, script, or essay about a current event reported in the paper. The
children then tell their story from a variety of viewpoints: this individual's friend, teacher, mother or father, sister or
brother, or the family dog.
•        Analyze a music composition (e.g., classical, rock, folk) and create a short script that follows the tone, pace,
movements, etc. of this music. Students select a piece of music, listen to the different instruments and elements, and
assess how the music could be a conversation.
Social Studies Learning Goals
Studying history, geography, and other social studies subjects through the arts (and vice versa) enables gifted
students to investigate topics from multiple viewpoints and in more depth. As they create vivid representations of
significant events, processes, and people, they analyze, assess, and interpret the facts and images before them.
Activities such as the following use imagination and analytical abilities in new ways:
•        Analyze the life of a famous historical figure. Students study the portraits of this person, musical pieces
composed for them, stories told about them, and films made in their honor along with textual sources. What do visual
representations tell them about this person? Students pretend to be this historical figure, choose an issue that they
feel passionate about and write a speech as this person. They can express their ideas through visual art, mime, or
dramatics.
•        Apply an art phenomenon to social/historical reality. Students act as reporters who travel back in time to cover
important events in an artistic movement. They analyze a phenomenon (such as impressionism) and write a
newspaper article about how this phenomenon responds to certain social, political, and historical conditions. What
does impressionism tell the students about this time? How was the technique of impressionism a break with what
existed before and how did this relate to the time?
•        Investigate and analyze the contrasting views of two sides of a conflict, issue, or struggle. Students examine
the art of 19th century western artists versus that of African populations and grapple with the European belief in
African "primitivism." How are the colonizers and colonized represented and why? What does this tell students about
the artists and their world? How does the art of the colonized Africans express their social and political condition?
Students write a position paper on 19th century European views of Africans and Africa, as seen through their art and
writing (they can also do the reverse). They create an art gallery for student work that depicts their ideas.

Science and Mathematics Learning Goals
Science, mathematics, and art all concern themselves with the true nature of things. Are things what they seem?
Should the arts depict things as people experience them or as they are? The following activities suggest ways to
blend the arts with math and science in such a way that gifted students can examine real-world applications of
fundamental concepts and ideas (such as distance, color, perspective, proportion).
•        Apply a scientific concept to a problem in art. Have students explore a scientific subject (such as light). Place
paintings together that seem particularly suited to this subject and ask children to discuss how artists represent the
science of light-its directions, color at different times of the day, its interaction with water and color, etc. Students can
select some aspect of light that interests them scientifically and, like artists, think of ways to represent this visually
through painting, collage, or sketches.
•        Analyze the nature of matter using the arts and physics as sources. Both science and art deal with illusion-
what seems to be but is not. Using visual art (e.g., surrealists), modern dance performance and other sources,
students write down the assumptions artists (particularly experimental artists) are making about the nature of matter.
(Is it always in motion? Is it static? Is it solid and impenetrable as it appears?) Investigate one or more of these
assumptions in physics and write an essay justifying or questioning artistic representations.
•        Sharpen visual perception and increase ability to estimate accurately. Artists often test their perceptions by
estimating distances and heights. Students can test their perceptions by putting a stick into the ground (so that six
inches show) on a sunny day and measure the length of the shadow cast by the six-inch stick. Next, measure the
length of the shadow of a nearby tree. How would the students calculate the height of the tree in inches? In feet? Let
them devise their own system for figuring this out. They can diagram, use paintings, photographs, etc.









A:
•        Advertisement
•        Advice Column
•        Anecdote
B:
•        Ballad
•        Bibliography
•        Billboard
•        Biography
•        Blueprint
•        Board game
•        Book jacket
•        Book review
•        Bulletin board
•        Bumper sticker
•        Business card
C:
•        Card game
•        Cardboard relief
•        Cartoon
•        CD-ROM entry
•        Celebrity card
•        Chalk talk
•        Character sketch
•        chart
•        Choral reading
•        Classified ad
•        Collage
•        Comic strip
•        Commemorative stamp
•        Conversation
•        Costume
•        Critique
•        Crossword puzzle
Dance
•        Debate
•        Demonstration
•        Diagram
•        Diary
•        Diorama
•        Directory
•        Display
•        Drama
•        Dramatic set design


E:
•        Editorial
•        Elegy
•        E-mail
•        Epistle
•        Epilogue
•        Epitaph
•        Experiment
F-H:
•        Fable
•        Fact file
•        Fairy tale
•        Fax
•        Flip book
•        Folk tale
•        Family tree
•        Finger painting
•        Glossary
•        Graph
•        Greeting card
•        Horoscope
I_L:
•        Illustrated story
•        Index
•        Indictment
•        Interview
•        Invitation
•        Journal
•        Jump Rope Rhyme
•        Legend
•        Lesson
•        Letter limerick
•        Logic puzzle
•        Lyrics
M:
•        Magazine article
•        Map
•        Maxim
•        Melodrama
•        Memo
•        Memoir
•        Menu
•        Mobile
•        Model
•        Monologue
•        Montage
•        Motto
•        Mural
•        Museum exhibit
•        Myth
N:
•        Narrative poem
•        Newscast
•        Newspaper article
•        Nursery Rhyme
O-P:
•        Obituary
•        Ode
•        Painting
•        Pamphlet
•        Panel discussion
•        Pantomime
•        Paper folding
•        Parable
•        Parody
•        Photographs
•        Picture dictionary
•        Pinata
•        Postcard
•        Political cartoon
•        Poster
•        Prologue
•        Promotional brochure
•        Prototype
•        Proverb
•        Puppet show
•        Puzzle
O-P:
•        Obituary
•        Ode
•        Painting
•        Pamphlet
•        Panel discussion
•        Pantomime
•        Paper folding
•        Parable
•        Parody
•        Photographs
•        Picture dictionary
•        Pinata
•        Postcard
•        Political cartoon
•        Poster
•        Prologue
•        Promotional brochure
•        Prototype
•        Proverb
•        Puppet show
•        Puzzle


Q-R:
•        Quiz
•        Questionnaire
•        Radio serial episode
•        Reader’s theater
•        Recipe
•        Reference file
•        Relief map
•        Requiem
•        Resume
•        Review
•        Rhymed couplet
•        Role playing
•        Riddle
•        Rubbing


S:
•        Sales pitch
•        Sandwich board
•        Satire
•        Scale drawing
•        Scavenger hunt
•        Schedule
•        Scrapbook
•        Script
•        Sculpture
•        Silhouette
•        Silk screening
•        Singing telegram
•        Slide/tape presentation
•        Skit
•        Slogan
•        Song
•        Sonnet
•        Speech (formal/informal)
•        Spoof
•        Stencil
•        Storyboard
•        Survey
•        Syllabus
T-Z:
•        Tableau vivant
•        Tall tale
•        Taped recording
•        Terrarium
•        Textbook
•        Timeline
•        Transcript
•        Transparency
•        Travelogue
•        Tribute
•        TV Program
•        Video Game
•        Videotaped production
•        Vignette
•        Vita
•        Vocabulary list
•        Want ad
•        Wanted poster
•        Will
•        Window display
•        Wordless book


Level 1:  Knowledge

•        Know
•        Define
•        Memorize
•        Repeat
•        Record
•        List
•        Recall
•        Name
•        Reiterate
•        State
•        Restate
•        Relate
•        Collect
•        Label
•        Specify
•        Cite
•        Enumerate
•        Tell
•        Retell
•        Recount

Level 3:  Application

        Display
        Exhibit
        Solve
        Indicate
        Interview
        Question
        Simulate
        Imitate
        Apply
        Replicate
        Employ
        Represent
        Use
        Utilize
        Demonstrate
        Clarify
        Dramatize
        Stage
        Practice
        Rehearse
        Illustrate
        Portray
        Operate
        Depict
        Calculate
        Compute
        Show
        Present



Level 5:  Synthesis

        Compose
        Plan
        Invent
        Develop
        Design
        Formulate
        Assemble
        Construct
        Create
        Devise
        Pretend
        Theorize
        Set up
        Prepare
        Imagine
        Hypothesize
        Incorporate
        Generalize
        Originate
        Project
        Predict
        Forecast
        Contrive
        Concoct
        Systematize
        Speculate
        Suppose

Level 2:  Comprehension

o        Summarize
o        Paraphrase
o        Discuss
o        Describe
o        Recognize
o        Explain
o        Express
o        Identify
o        Locate
o        Find
o        Report
o        Reword
o        Review
o        Translate







Level 4:  Analysis

        Interpret
        Analyze
        Differentiate
        Compare
        Contrast
        Scrutinize
        Categorize
        Probe
        Investigate
        Discover
        Inquire
        Detect
        Inspect
        Classify
        Arrange
        Group
        Organize
        Examine
        Survey
        Dissect
        Inventory
        Experiment
        Test
        Distinguish
        Diagram
        Find out





Level 6:  Evaluation

        Judge
        Decide
        Appraise
        Evaluate
        Rate
        Revise
        Conclude
        Select
        Criticize
        Amend
        Consider
        Resolve
        Assess
        Elect
        Estimate
        Infer
        Deduce
        Grade
        Score
        Choose
        Recommend
        Determine
        Arbitrate
        Gauge
        Correct
        Advise
        Suggest
        Propose
ABC Ideas Chart
Bloom's Taxonomy
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