Rhodes School District 84.5

Visual Art

The Visual Arts program at Rhodes School begins in Kindergarten and continues through 7th grade. Our focus is a combination of visual concepts, art history, and the building of skills and techniques. We build a strong foundation in visual thinking with the elements of line, color, shape, texture, and space. We choose projects which will lend themselves to making connections to other disciplines in our curriculum such as Social Studies, Language Arts, and Science. We try to incorporate some higher-order thinking activities. Our Visual Arts program incoperates 21st century thinking skills and the 4 "C's" which are collaboration, communication, critical thinking and creativity.

Some specific units we have done include Art that tells a Story, Cave Art, Renaissance Art, Art of the Middle Ages, and a multicultural unit. One of our more recent goals is to build a visual vocabulary so that our students will understand some of the languages we use to describe works of art.

The focus of our program is creativity, self-expression, and exploration. We guide our students to address themselves to the many ways of doing, seeing, and solving problems. Our students visit the Art Institute of Chicago and the Mexican Fine Arts Museum. They participate in some of the museum education programs available. We use a variety of publications as source material such as School Arts, Arts, and Activities, Artist's Monthly, and Scholastic Art.

Teachers can be contacted via DOJO and email. Please visit our Staff Connection to contact your child's teacher.


Blast From the Past Art Gallery

Visual Art Curriculum Maps