¶ … Students will be able to analyze and critique Baroque style painting by looking at five Baroque style masters. They will learn the different methods of Baroque style painting -- the use of impasto (thick paint), sprezzato (rapid strokes), chiaroscuro (the use of light and shadow), and dynamism (the sense of motion). This information will allows students to better understand how the Baroque manner took shape and it will also underscore the meaning to these methods and how it differentiated painters from the Renaissance style of painting. At the end of the three lesson plans, students will be able to identify and develop the techniques of Baroque artist. This will support the students' ability to create, present and respond to visual art by teaching them the tools of the artist. Thus, will be able to recognize styles of brushstroke and how eras like the Baroque have incorporated these strokes into the craft. This knowledge will be all the more firmly established given the actual practice they will have implementing these methods in their own paintings, which will be based on the Baroque manner and method. They will also be able to tell the class what type of style/stroke they implemented for what effect and how it impacts the overall theme of the visual art they create. In this manner, they will learn to interpret art, that is to say be able to identify how key themes, forms and genres are produced through stylish effect and critical use of stroke. They will also have a historical knowledge of the background of the Baroque era (the support of the Catholic Church in the face of Protestant Reformation) and will be able to show how art relates to social, political and economic developments in society.

1c.

In lesson one students will analyze and critique Baroque works of art. Lesson plan two builds on lesson plan one by learning the understanding of the process from concept to the execution of an actual Baroque painting by beginning their own. Lesson three students will continue their paintings that were started in the previous lesson till completion.

By developing Baroque works of art, students will be able to interpret what it meant to develop meaningful works of art from the Baroque era. They will have first-hand experience of this craft, which will deepen their appreciation of the works they have studied and the skill and labor that went into producing them. The students will also be given the choice to research a painter and a work from this era in order to better understand the era and style and this will give them the opportunity to place the artwork into context for themselves and unite themselves to the subject via contextual criticism.

Prompt 2a.

The 12th grade studio art class contains a variety of students from various learning levels -- for instance two ELL students, three special needs students, and two gifted students. Their knowledge is minimal to Baroque art, however the main focus is the actual painting techniques utilized in Baroque painting. All students will be able to attain a degree of understanding, which will allow them to express themselves creatively to produce a work of art mimicking the Baroque style.

2b.

The everyday experiences of my students, their culture and their language backgrounds, practices and interests have prepared them to some degree for this class. For instance, they all watch television and television shows are based on drama. Baroque art uses this sense of drama to give meaning to its paintings because it reflected the dramatic situation going on in Europe at that time, which has shaped the rest of the world in modernizing terms. If what happened in Europe hadn't happened, then we here would not be as we are. Thus, their use of language and words and even their social culture is directly related to these works of art through historical chains of events.

2c.

The students' motor skills are good and even the special needs students have the ability to learn about this subject even though their attention spans might struggle with focusing on concepts. The activities of painting and utilizing the strokes/styles should help to promote their involvement, especially the use of the sprezzato technique. The students have exhibited some interest in painting and trying out the techniques though they do not have any basis for believing that they will be able to do them as well as the Baroque era masters, but...

Thus I reinforce the belief in their own ability to affirming their basic innate qualities. In order to help the special needs students with their attention deficits, we focus on several ideas so that they can move from one to the next and see how they all apply together. For example, the artists would not use just one style or skill or method of painting but would implement them all in one work of art. Recognizing this gives the students more to be aware of and think about so that they do not have to focus on just one method or style at a time but can see the whole and spread themselves out a bit and not feel so confined in this way.
Supporting the Students' Visual Arts Learning. 3a

My understanding of my students' prior academic learning, personal, cultural, and community assets and physical development/conditions guided my choice in adaptation of learning tasks and materials in the sense that I saw the benefit of illustrating how a number of methods were simultaneously used in order to produce an overall effect on the works of art. I also identified various aspects of the culture of the Baroque era and relate them to our own cultural era, highlighting both differences and similarities. For instance, in the Baroque era, there was intense fighting over the connection between the Church and State -- and today that same fighting is seen at a social and political level. This illustrates that the same issues and topics that were important to people 400 years ago are still important to people today. So I ask the students why that is and challenge them to engage with the topic of visual art on an intellectual level so as to better immerse themselves in the subject and its background significance. Then we apply our learning of the techniques to see how through active participation we can create effects in painting that cause us to experience different feelings, which can then be connected to the subject of the painting and the subject can be connected to the social issues of society. Thus, we focus on the both the micro and macro presentation.

3b.

These instructional strategies and planned supports are appropriate for the whole class, individuals, and groups of students with specific learning needs in the following way: the whole class benefits from a solid understanding of how integral art and society are, how the one reflects the other and how the other produces the one. They see how issues are related to the art, and they see how the artist uses new techniques to express ideas newly. The students with attention deficit disorders gain from the connectivity of this approach, responding to the intellectually stimulating nature of the subject's interactions with style, art form, genre, social issues and how those issues span centuries to still be relevant today and why that is. The individual student gains from this approach because he or she is challenged to identify with a particular work or painter and to seek to better understand that work or painter so as to deepen his or her own sense of the era, style and visual medium.

3c.

Common errors or misunderstandings within my central focus are that students need everything to be compartmentalized, so that one area is addressed at a time, but this affects the way in which they comprehend the whole and the interrelatedness of the parts. Therefore, I plan to address this issue by constantly referring back to the whole -- the who, what, where, why, and how -- of the visual art. This means that I will show how the styles were practiced and shared by artists, perfected, developed and made new over the years, and how their development coincided with social issues and how those issues impacted the art and I will raise questions about what art is today and what it represents and why it is so different and what that means and says about our world and society today. Basically, I will challenge them to ask what art tells us about ourselves and what we can learn from art, which acts as a mirror, as Shakespeare noted.

Supporting Visual Arts Development Through Language 4a.

The language function is essential in my students' development of a strong sense of the visual arts, and the language function that I identify for my class is the need to exposit or…