Students practice engaging with art, making meaning from that interaction, and considering how art can connect us to people and ideas across time and place. Use this before a museum visit to set the stage for a rich in-gallery experience that is inquiry-based.

Structure this simple activity in a way that makes sense for your class. Make a game of it, use written responses to augment discussion, frame it in the lens of your academic discipline, etc.

This simple, scaffolded discussion activity fosters creative and critical thinking and communication skills. Citizenship skills are encouraged as well: making personal connections with art, students are invited to extending these ideas by considering the common and divergent values of the whole group.

Shared narratives can be found in art from many cultures and throughout time. Use this resource to encourage students to explore diverse narratives, discover their own personal narrative, and express that narrative through their own work of art.Using provided engagment strategies students are able to hone Critical, Creative, and Communication skills using works of art in the Virginia Museum of Arts collection. Discussion prompts and activities offer instructional oppotunities for building Collaboration and Citizenship skills. 

Shared narratives can be found in art from many cultures and throughout time. Use this resource to encourage students to explore diverse narratives, discover their own personal narrative, and express that narrative through their own work of art.Using provided engagment strategies students are able to hone Critical, Creative, and Communication skills using works of art in the Virginia Museum of Arts collection. Discussion prompts and activities offer instructional oppotunities for building Collaboration and Citizenship skills. Symbols that we find in literature and the use of figurative language to describe artworks go hand in hand.  Find two pieces of artwork that move you one in Virginia and one in an international museum and create multiple examples of 10 different types of figuative language.

Use artworks as a laboratory for communication skills across the curriculum! This activity fosters meta-cognition by challenging students to gather and communicate crucial information. It also encourages close observation, problem-solving, synthesizing, critical thinking, and collaboration.

This appendix is a compilation of various lists of words and phrases, some of which are quite brief, and some of which, like the "useful words" list, are quite extensive. Some of the materials rely on transliteration alone and therefore require no knowledge of Arabic script while others are written in Arabic. The word lists are focused on common words such as professions, greetings, common expressions, and also include a fictional dialogue of two people greeting each other.