FAIR School (Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource School)
Location:
Crystal, MN
Grade:
6
Disciplines:
Visual Art Social Studies Language Arts
Description:
Students analyze artifacts and create exhibitions.
Analyzing a Culture — The Story Continues
Program Summary Students become archeologists, analyzing artifacts from other student-created cultures. They then design a museum exhibit from those artifacts.
Rick Wright, 6th-Grade Teacher After spring break, the creation part of the unit is over. The kids bundle up all of their artifacts and hand them off to another group in a different classroom. Students then get to wear the hats of archaeologists. They have to interpret another group’s culture through their artifacts and figure out what that civilization was like.
Rachael Hoffman-Dachelet, Visual Art Teacher Near the end of the Island Cultures project, I took all of the sixth-graders to the local art museum and we looked at art from a variety of ancient cultures. We paid a lot of attention to how the exhibits were curated, because the kids take the artifacts that the other groups created and curate little mini-exhibits. They needed to start thinking consciously, not just about the artworks, how the artworks are created, and how those artworks relate to culture, but also about how archaeologists and art historians present the artworks of ancient cultures to the pubic.
