Learn why artists have been featuring food as a subject in their work for centuries.  You’ve been told to eat your vegetables, but have you ever tried to paint them? Special Guest Lisa McLaughlin, the baker behind Jesse’s Girl Cookies, invites us into her kitchen to experiment with modern art techniques on cakes, and then we’ll make our own painting of a scrumptious treat inspired by 20th-Century painter Wayne Thiebaud.

Get moving in The Creative Corner with a seriously silly drawing challenge, a visit with the Anna Julia Cooper Episcopal School step team, and a great big outdoor adventure art project. Learn to create blind-contour drawings and land art installations.  

 Each student writes a one paragraph summary of a chapter of a book and then illustrates their chapter. It can be used for a book the whole class is reading so then all of the summaries are collected and bound together to create a “summary book” of the book read. This activity can be used for both fiction and non-fiction books in any subject and any grade, although this activity is linked to upper primary SOLs. This activity assesses reading comprehension and practices all writing skills. It also includes Art SOLs, and if you have students create their final products on the computer, then you would be incorporating the Computer Technology SOLs as well. If it is used for a non-fiction text in a different content class, then the activity would also cover those SOLs. It can be used for EL classes in middle school also. 

In this activity, you will design a device that will substantially impact our environment. You can write words around your device’s image to help explain your ideas. This device does not have to be realistic. See the example of how to draw a device prototype below. An example of an approach could be to create a sizable water Roomba-like device that cleans the top of a body of water and burns the trash collected. This process turns the trash into oxygen.

After studying the Pop Art movement and learning about artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Sister Corita Kent, students will create meaningful text art influenced by Pop Art. Students will choose a word that is meaningful to them to emphasize. This project can be completed using a word in the language of the students’ choice.

 Today, you want to discuss how artists can help bring awareness of environmental changes through art. Introduce a few artists that use environmental change as their theme. It is a good idea to have several artists that use different kinds of mediums. Examples: Nils-Udo, Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Shilling, Agnes Denes, Chris Jordan, Benjamin Von Wong, Olafur Eliasson, Amanda Schachter, Rachel Sussman, and Mathilde Roussel. These are some environmental artists of different backgrounds and diversity that work in different medians.  Discuss how posters have been used to educate others on environmental changes. Show your teacher’s example of an educational and artistic environmental poster. Talk about your poster and the environmental concept that you chose as an example of not only the artwork but on a presentation as well.

This lesson sequence offers students and teachers a way to explore their individual identities and sense of belonging through analyzing children’s literature and coding with Scratch. Through read-aloud activities and self-differentiated Scratch projects, students learn about the value of inclusion and explore and express ideas about their personal and social identities. Students will describe environments supportive of diversity, and reflect on their own identity as they create expressive projects about their sense of belonging. This sequence is made up of four lessons, though your students may need additional class time to work on their projects.This lesson sequence is part of CodeVA's committment to the U.S. Department of Education "YOU Belong in STEM" initiative.

In this short video (2:35), a Virginia art teacher shares a strategy for teaching creative thinking by enabling students to express personal ideas, images, and themes through artistic choices of media, techniques, and subject matter.