If you’ve got a great lesson plan needing a modern makeover, check out our tips below for breathing new life into old lesson plans.
1. Confirm Current Standards
Check the latest curriculum requirements and national and state standards to see if your favorite lesson still makes the cut. If it comes up short, see if you can find ways to tweak it. Alterations that make it fit current standards may give it just the spark it needs!
2. Think Big
See if you can tie your lesson plan into a school-wide project that reinforces the initiative and gives it visual interest and prominence.
3. Keep It Fresh
Consider ways you might modernize the topic. Find out what themes are most likely to hold the interest of your students. How might you tie some of those interests into your plan?
4. Tech Upgrade
Use new technology to present your plan in a new way. For example, you could incorporate YouTube videos into your presentation to illustrate techniques.
5. Scale It
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 8-1/2 x 11 into a poster-sized project.
6. Medium Change
Try your lesson on another work surface. Could you move from canvas to cardboard or fabric?
7. Switch Up the Tools
Try painting a lesson that you’ve done with markers in the past. Or try chalk.
8. Make It a Group Project
Turn an individual lesson into a class collaboration by breaking the finished piece into smaller bits and assigning a part to each student. Check out these fun, collaborative art projects for students!
9. Style It Up!
Overlay a particular style, like adjusting your annual self-portrait plan to 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.
Once you’ve updated and executed your plan with students, remember that there are all kinds of fun things you can do with finished work these days! Take things one step further by printing your students’ finished pieces as posters, on tee shirts or mugs, or putting together a digital slide show of all student submissions.
Have you reformed an outdated lesson plan? We’d love to see your before and afters and hear 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!
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