Students will make connections between their personal experiences and a work of art and use visual analysis to describe a portrait.

Students will "read" a visual image very much like they would read words in a story.

Students will spend more time looking at details and write an imagined interview with a sitter.

Students will apply what they have learned about portraits in a formal writing exercise.

Students will examine artworks, research literature, and create study drawings and a 3-D model for a monument to a literary figure.

Students will examine Charles-Antoine Coypel's "Self-Portrait" and understand what he shows in this work.

Students will use Van Gogh's "Portrait of Joseph Roulin" as inspiration for their own portraits of friends in the classroom.

Students will compare the daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe by an unknown photographer with Poe's writings in an effort to discover the character of this mysterious author.

Students explore 19th-century photographer Edward Curtis's documentation of a ritual performed by Native Americans. They then consider how ceremony and ritual practice are depicted and understood by those outside of a religious culture. Students use photography to document their own religious or spiritual rituals, and then examine one another's images and interpret their peers' spiritual beliefs based on the photographs.

Referring to a Roman gravestone for inspiration, students use a foam carving medium and carving tools to create a bas-relief (low-relief) gravestone for a beloved pet. Students then write an epitaph for the pet using a standard form of poetry that is appropriate for the setting, such as an elegy, ode, or couplet.

Students will compare portrayals of individual soldiers to depictions of battle scenes, write two articles representing two different perspectives about a current war, and manipulate a photograph to alter its mood.

Students will discuss the effects of war on families as depicted in a drawing and relief sculpture and re-create an artwork by forming a tableau and making a sculpture for a brave person.

Students will compare and contrast artworks depicting different viewpoints about war and will write captions that describe works of art in different media. They will also manipulate the image depicted in a photograph of a war in recent history.

Students will examine a contemporary video installation and a 17th-century Flemish painting and consider how artists use a specific medium to communicate ideas. They will then create a storyboard plan for their own video.

Music Education apps to learn basic elements of music, including fast/slow, high/low, loud/soft, reading music notation, etc.

Past and present come together when students interview their parents and create a skit that compares their parents' experiences as middle schoolers with the students own lives.