"Add" Art to Your Classroom!

In celebration of National Math Month, we’ve gathered materials that help your students explore the many connections between the arts and math. From the numbers behind the music to the geometry in art and architecture, you'll discover that the influence of math is a common denominator in the arts!

Lessons:

Students create a modern artist's painting in the style of Spanish artist Joan Miró (1893-1983). Students explore how horizontal, vertical and curved lines can be combined with basic geometric and natural shapes to create an original painting.

This lesson explores the relationship between rhythm and math.

Students explain, and then use rope to create, several geometric shapes. They then create a dance based on the shapes.

Fusing math and art, students analyze Aesop's fable, "The Crow and the Pitcher" through puppetry and experimentation.

How-To:

This is the fourth How-To in the series, Teaching for Understanding in the Visual and Performing Arts based on the principles of Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTigue.

Advocacy Essential:

Advocating the implementation of the arts into the daily classroom, this article stresses the benefits of an art-enriched curriculum.

Look·Listen·Learn:

This interactive resource uses selections from a National Symphony Orchestra concert to illustrate musical extremes. Analyze the effect of extreme dynamics, tempo, and more through a variety of listening, reading, and movement activities.

How have artists, through the centuries, captured the body - particularly the body in motion? Through richly annotated paintings, sculptures, and photographs, students will discover the technical and creative advances which drove artistic renderings of the moving body – from the mathematical precision that formed the basis of Egyptian figures, to the complex systems and innovations at work in the art of the Hellenistic Greeks, to the dynamic surfaces of the Modern era.