In MN, engagement with art happens before visitors enter the museum.  This provided students with specific prior knowledge of the artwork, so that when they entered the museum, they felt connected to what was hanging on the walls.

Using art cards, 4×5 photographs of artwork in the permanent collection, the writing lessons led students to sort through the cards while answering questions, searching for a card to write about.  This provided students with choice and added personal connection between the art and their writing.

In order to make this project of value to teachers, the purpose for visiting the museum needed to be aligned with more than content standards for writing.  The program needed substitute lessons with exact objectives of what teachers had to normally teach during their writing blocks.  Educators are leery of activities that take time away from specific curriculum mandates and skill-building objectives that are tested in the spring.  Field trips, often rich in facts about a subject matter, do not necessarily increase students’ ability to transfer knowledge or skills from one context to another. Pre-tour lessons often contain content pertaining to the exhibition, thus becoming an “add-on” that teachers need to find time to teach.

Based on the premise that teachers lack time more than financial resources, this project explored how to create curriculum for a museum visit that aligns with writing practices in a local district, so that the commodity of class time is used efficiently. By providing teachers with a series of pre-visit lessons that follow a Writers’ Workshop model, teachers were able to deliver their current writing content through mini-lessons involving pictures of artwork on display in the FAC museum.

Rationale for curriculum

The Writer’s Workshop curriculum developed for this program teaches personal narrative, because non-fiction and fact-based narrative writing is used in many genres, from expository and persuasive texts to scientific articles, thus, learning how to write a strong narrative supports other forms of writing.  Some of the skills addressed in the curriculum include adding details and description language to writing involving a small moment in time, using words that “show not tell” and including strong beginnings and endings.