History by Design: NYC Edition: Kick-off Phase

A list of student resources from our cultural partners can be found here as a Google Doc. If there is a resource you'd like to receive from a particular institution, please let me know so I can connect you. All of the cultural partners are ready and eager to help you in whatever way they can. Please do not hesitate to reach out.  

Below are some classroom activity ideas. Please note some elements might need to be adapted for remote learning. 

• National Portrait Gallery
  • 5 activity ideas from the "Making a Mark: Creating a Museum in Your Classroom" initiative. 
    • These activities will help students use portraits, paintings, and images to find out about the past.
    • If teaching remotely, instead of printing out images found in the image gallery, you can send students the exact URL to each image.
  • The "Museum in Your Classroom Toolkit" walks teachers through the 5 stages of creating an exhibit:
    • Planning
    • Researching your theme
    • Creating the displays
    • Bringing your exhibition to life
    • Publicizing and launching your exhibition
    • Inspiration gallery
  • Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS)
    • Start each session with the image of the day!

The CAO SharePoint site contains important instructional and professional learning resources for teaching and learning, and supports multilingual learners and students with disabilities in remote and blended settings. You can access the CAO SharePoint site to find resources, guidance, and supports for remote and blended learning such as the Instructional Resources for the 2020–21 School Year guide, blended and remote learning considerations, Learning Maps, the Google Classroom Demonstration, NYC DOE Remote Teaching Quick Start Guide, professional learning videos and much more.

For questions, email remotelearning@schools.nyc.gov.

Getting Started: Personal Inventory 

Interests, skills, and talents—we all have them. What are yours? 

Interests are what you think about and what you would like to know more about—for example, technology, the arts, social media, or a historical event. Are you interested in animals, movies, mysteries, or travel? Do you collect anything? 

Skills and talents have to do with things that you like to do, or that you do easily or well. Is there an activity you especially enjoy? Do you have a favorite subject in school? Do you sing, play the saxophone, or study ballet? Do you know more than one language? Can you cook? Do you have any special computer skills, like to take photographs or play soccer? 

Areas for growth refer to abilities or qualities you aim to develop or improve.

Work with a partner and take turns interviewing each other to identify your interests, skills and talents, and areas for growth. 

Interests: I like to learn and think about . . .

Skills and talents: I can . . .

Areas for Growth: What I aim to develop or improve...

Adapted from The Complete Guide to Service Learning: Proven, Practical Ways to Engage Students in Civic Responsibility, Academic Curriculum, & Social Action (Revised & Updated Second Edition), Cathryn Berger Kaye, M.A., copyright © 2010. Free Spirit Publishing Inc., Minneapolis, MN. 

• Review the Passport to Social Studies curriculum to see how you can make curricular connections to HBD:NYC. There are also curricular connections made for you in Hidden Voices itself. 
• The New York City K-8 Scope and Sequence is a comprehensive resource that integrates national standards, the New York State Social Studies Core Curriculum (content, concepts, key ideas, understandings and performance indicators), the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) and the New York State K-8 Social Studies Framework. Check out the Social Studies Scope & Sequence: Grades K-8 for help on how to teach to the Social Studies Practices for each grade level. 
  • The six social studies practices are:
    1. Gathering, Interpreting, and Using Evidence
    2. Chronological Reasoning and Causation
    3. Comparison and Contextualization
    4. Geographic Reasoning
    5. Economics and Economic Systems
    6. Civic Participation
• On document page 14-21, you will find the Vertical Articulation and Progression of Social Studies Practices in the New York State Common Core Social Studies K-12 Frameworks which might be helpful to know for this program. 

Canvas= A closely woven, sturdy cloth of hemp, cotton, linen, or a similar fiber, frequently stretched over a frame and used as a surface for painting.

Curator= A person who manages or oversees a collection of work at a cultural institution. Curators may be responsible for procuring new work and deciding how to display it to the public.

Docent= A person who leads guided tours especially through a museum or art gallery.

Exhibit Display Station= A place in a gallery where the visitor is viewing one artifact or exhibit.

Hero Image= The first visual element a visitor encounters meant to draw in attention and interest.

Introduction Label= The first label a visitor sees explaining an exhibit display. The introduction label should be a “teaser” and talk about the main sections of your exhibit to encourage people to see the rest.

Object Label/Tombstone= Identifying text for an artwork placed in an exhibition. Label information may include the name of the artist who created the artwork, the title and dimensions of the object, its media, date of creation, and owner. Labels are also referred to as "captions" or "tombstones."

Plinth= A plinth is a heavy base or box on which a sculpture stands or is presented.

Additional resources:

• The Tate's list of art terms defined
• The MoMA's list of art terms defined
• The Museum Association of New York's list of art terms defined
• Theresa Pizzuto from 28Q175 P.S. 175 The Lynn Gross Discovery School made this fun quiz for students based on the vocab above!

The following activity suggestions are the copyright of Mary Ann Cappiello and taken from the larger article "Using Online Museum Resources for Literacy Learning" published in the School Library Journal on March 25, 2020.

• Writing Ekphrastic Poetry 
  • Ekphrastic poetry is poetry that explores a piece of art. The writer works from a piece of art to consider the meaning or story within the art. You can create ekphrastic poetry about historic or contemporary art. Back in March of 2018, we blogged about World Make Way: New Poems Inspired by Art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an entire collection of ekphrastic poetry for children edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins. The Poetry Foundation offers some examples of ekphrastic poetry helpful to use with tweens and teens. Follow this link to a set of directions that I have used over the years with students (K-12 to graduate) to generate drafts of ekphrastic poetry. Feel free to download and revise the language to meet the developmental and language needs of your students. 
• Writing Fiction From Art
  • When I was practicing writing historical fiction, I used the 17th and 18th century rooms in the American Wing of the Met as inspiration. I then followed the same format with my own students with different collections and in different museums. In these instances, we were studying particular times, places, and cultures. Students used those prompts to generate story nuggets that they could further research to turn into historical fiction. Follow this link to a set of directions that I have used over the years with students (K-12 to graduate) to generate drafts of fiction or historical fiction. Feel free to download and revise to meet the developmental and language needs of your students. 
• Writing Nonfiction with Art
  • Artifacts in history museums and art museums are wonderful ways to engage students in the everyday life and culture of a people. Students can explore museum collections connected to time periods and cultures that you are exploring, and apply a set of research questions to a range of objects and artifacts. Over the years, I’ve encouraged students to consider these primary source objects as important entry points into a deeper understanding of everyday life. Have students continue to follow whatever note-taking method they are using for documenting information from secondary sources for these primary sources. Have them take information from digital museum “card” information made available, and have them include a description of what the object looks like. Or, follow this link to a set of directions that I have used over the years with students (K-12 to graduate) to explore art and artifacts as part of a larger exploration of a time period or culture. Feel free to download and revise the language to meet the developmental and language needs of your students.