Ready to ditch those monotonous worksheets? When you want your child to really learn a concept, instead of pulling out the workbooks, grab your art supplies.

Art gets the whole body involved. In her book, Smart Moves: Why Learning Is Not All In Your Head, Carla Hannaford explains how the more senses you use, the faster and more permanent the learning.

I interviewed Mrs. Hall, an amazing 3rd grade teacher at a local charter school, who uses art to teach across her curriculum. When she wants her students to remember something she doesn’t drill and kill, she does an art project!

Ideas To Infuse Art Into Any Subject.

These are Mrs. Hall’s ideas that she uses successfully in her classroom.

Math

• Students created poems about math concepts. For example, her students wrote an acrostic poem about the concept plane figures.
• After reading aloud The Secret Garden, students made their own secret gardens out of shoe boxes using the concepts of perimeter and area.
• While studying solid figures, students created their own 3-D figures out of card stock.

Science

• Students took digital pictures of a rock they brought into class. Then wrote a descriptive paragraph about the rock.
• Drew pictures of living fossils to learn about texture and shading.
• Used clay to experience how igneous rocks form.
• Created triaramas (uses less space than dioramas, here are directions from Crayola.com) to make a dinosaur habitat.

History

Do what the people you are studying do. For example, pottery, metal work, painting, weaving, etc.

Language Arts

• Students illustrated all of their writing. Mrs. Hall choose an element of art to be the focus of each illustration. For example, she chose the art element ‘texture’ when she had them create a collage for a writing piece the students did at the end of the book My Father’s Dragon.
• After reading a story about a family going camping, the students wrote about their own camping experience and drew a picture to illustrate using chalk.
• After reading a biography, students wrote a summary, then created a portrait of the person using a different medium each time (torn paper, watercolor, colored pencils).
• Wrote a personal narrative then drew a self-portrait.
• Wrote a character analysis using facts from the book, then drew a full body portrait of the character.
• Imitated the illustrations from the books they read using the same techniques and medium as the artist.