If you’ve got a great lesson plan in need of a modern makeover, check out our tips below for breathing new life into old lesson plans.
1. Check the latest curriculum requirements and national and state standards to see if your favorite lesson still makes the cut.
2. Can you tie your lesson plan into a school-wide project that reinforces the initiative and gives it visual interest and prominence?
3. Consider ways you might modernize the topic. What is your class into these days? How might you tie some of those interests into your plan?
4. Using new technology to present your plan is another way to bring it into the 21st century, for example incorporating YouTube videos into your presentation to illustrate techniques.
5. Shake up the nuts and bolts of your lessons! Try playing with the size of the finished piece – turn a scale project into a miniature or an 8.5 x 11 into a poster sized project.
6. Try your lesson on another work surface. Could you move from canvas to cardboard or fabric?
7. Mess with the medium. Might you paint a lesson that you’ve done with markers in the past? Or try chalk?
8. Turn an individual lesson into a class collaboration by breaking the finished piece into smaller bits and assigning one to each student. Check out these fun collaborative art projects for students.
9. Overlay a particular style – try your annual self-portrait plan as an abstract or impressionist piece.
10. Change locations! Take your art lesson outside or plan a field trip to present the topic to your students. For some fun art field trip ideas, visit our blog.
Once you’ve updated and executed your plan with your students, remember that there are all kinds of fun things you can do with finished work these days! Take things one (modern!) step further by printing your students’ finished pieces as posters, on tee shirts or mugs, or putting together a digital slide show of all of the student’s submissions.
Have you reformed an outdated lesson plan? We’d love to see your before and afters and hear your tips for modernizing those tried-and-true but slightly dated plans. Let us know in the comments below and don’t forget to share this post with your fellow teachers.
