Lesson Plan: Our Guam Art Museum 3

Print version of this lesson plan or all four.

Building our Guam art museum (Part 3 of 4)

Subjects

Art, History, Social Studies, Music

Grade-level

Elementary, 3-5
Middle School, 6-8
High School, 9-12

Time required

55 minutes (This can be extended and separated into two days.)

Materials required

Flipchart or chalk board
Markers or chalk
Poster board
Crayons and colored pencils
Scissors
Construction paper
Tape
Glue

Lesson Plan

Description

With this lesson students will outline their plans for an in-class Guam art museum, and develop a thematic structure and layout. They will also further strengthen their artist profiles, brainstorm on additional objects, images, and artwork to include in the museum, and begin creating their exhibits in groups.

Objectives/Skills

Students should be able to identify the goals for their classroom museum.
Students should also be able to cite strengths and weaknesses of the art exhibit visited during the field trip, and use this information to shape their plans.
Students will categorize their artist profiles in a clear manner, and begin creating their exhibits.

Questions or Assessment

What are our goals for this classroom museum?
What have we learned that can help use create an effective exhibit?
How best can we go about categorizing and organizing our museum?

Procedure

Teacher prep
None

Organizing our Guam Art Museum (20 minutes)

As a group, discuss the goals of the classroom Guam art museum:
- What is your audience? (Most likely, you may be able to have another class visit your classroom to attend the museum’s “grand opening”)
- What do you wish to teach? (Is there an over-arching theme, such as “cultural preservation” or “resistance”? This is not necessary, though, and probably only applicable for a classroom of advanced high school students)
- What do we want to emulate from the exhibit we visited on the field trip?
- What aspects of that exhibit do we want to avoid?
By this point, students should have also completed their artist profiles. Have each student briefly share with the class their artist name and the type of artwork the artist creates. List these names and types on the board.
Having listed them on the board, have the students suggest ways of organizing the artists into common groups. Feel free to use the themes suggested from the similar exercise in the first lesson of this series.
Having grouped the artists under common themes, break up the class into groups accordingly. Each student shall be assigned to a group according to the corresponding theme relative to their artist.

Creating our Exhibits (30 minutes)

In groups, have students plan out their exhibits. Be sure to allocate one section of the classroom to each group (so that they can begin visualizing their exhibit space).
Have them use poster board to display their profiles.
Encourage students to bring in images (such as pictures of the artist of their work), objects (such as a friend’s hand-written poetry), or sounds to include in the exhibit.
Note: It is likely that students will not have all their materials on the first day, and that planning and creation of the exhibits will take longer than planned.

You may extend this day’s lesson over two days, and effectively have a longer “work session” in the process. As such, students will have more time to work on their exhibits, and forgetful students can have another day to bring in their images, objects, and sounds.

Recap (5 minutes)
Recap what we’ve done and learned in the lesson:

“Today we set the foundation of our museum by creating an organizing structure for our exhibits. We then discussed our goals and aims, and informed these decisions by information we gathered during out field trip. Lastly, we began work on our actual exhibits, and by this point we are nearly ready for our grand opening!”

Ask students for their favorite parts of the lesson.