Welcome to TechKNOW Associates' You've Gotta Have Art! page. This project was developed through a partnership between TechKNOW Associates and World Book Inc. To download a copy of the project, you will need a userid and password. Please go to the Terms of Use page for more information.

TechKNOW Associates Corporation can provide expert, onsite staff development to insure that teachers and children fully implement this and other projects at a reasonable cost. We will train teachers in the classroom with their students, model lessons, and help them integrate technology into their curriculum through a project-based approach.

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You’ve Gotta Have Art!

Arts education benefits both student and society. It benefits the student because it cultivates the whole child, gradually building many kinds of literacy while developing intuition, reasoning, imagination, and dexterity into unique forms of expression and communication.

-- The National Standards for Arts Education

You’ve Gotta Have Art! is a bilingual project for grades three to six driven by the national standards of several disciplines. The project provides bilingual students with a stimulating method of acquiring second language skills using a project-based learning approach. You’ve Gotta Have Art! encourages students to become skilled in research and critical thinking skills as they explore the unique art contributions from many cultures and periods in history.

This project takes advantage of the resourceful nature of elementary bilingual learners, guiding them to produce meaningful products that demonstrate comprehension as well as higher-order thinking skills. Students’ fluency in the new language is at once encouraged and supported through the creation of authentic products.

You’ve Gotta Have Art! strives to engage students by appealing to their natural creativity and curiosity, while providing students with a strong foundation in research and language skills. Students will use technology to employ a variety of different intelligences and will demonstrate understanding in multiple formats.

You’ve Gotta Have Art! features a comprehensive introduction to the study of art and three interrelated learning phases containing many hands-on experiences and strategies for second language learning. The culminating event offers students a forum to present what they have learned as well as demonstrate their language proficiency:

Phase I: You’ve Gotta See It! Students will examine famous artists and noteworthy works of art. They will research background information and use their creativity to recreate and reinterpret works of art to construct a wall mural, which they will present to the school in their second language.

Phase II: You’ve Gotta Build It! Students will research architecture as an art form, focusing on a particular building and/or style of architecture. They will integrate mathematics skills by creating a 3-dimensional model in the style they are studying.

Phase III: You’ve Gotta Believe It! In this last phase of the project, students become artists. Students become artists as they create their own works of art. They will learn the tools and language of artists as they plan and design A Portrait of Life gallery producing a snapshot of their own lives or neighborhood. Students will also publish and bind a Bilingual Encyclopedia of Art, demonstrating their learning and featuring the products they have created.

The culminating activity will be an event called “You’ve Gotta Show What You Know!” This day will be an opportunity to celebrate student achievement. Students will present what they have learned and display their projects to invited guests.

This project can be adapted for grades 7 and 8 ESL or ELL students.