Creating Your Own Story

Through a series of activities, learners are exposed to how artists use symbolic imagery to create the narrative of a subject’s life. They study The Birth of Alexander and some manuscripts kept at J. Paul Getty Museum. They then draft...

How can something be true even if it didn't happen? Invite your classes to investigate the truths found in the world of magical realism as they analyze short stories, poems, informational texts, video, and art from this genre.

“Romanticism aims at enlarging experience by exploring the real.” This excerpt from Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence introduces a PowerPoint that examines the characteristics of and the major figures in music, art, and literature...

Personal narratives are powerful things. Whether told from the first-person or third-person point of view, whether in the form of an essay, a short story, novel, or video, whether fiction or fact, they capture readers and give them...

If you really want to know, this is a terrific lesson all about narratives, which is just a fancy way of saying telling stories. And you get to do it without being phony or anything. My favorite part is that you get to read a passage...

Did you know that some languages have no word for art? The English language does and the narrator of this short video discusses the aesthetic dimension of religious art as it "visually communicates meaning beyond language." 

After reading Flannery O'Connor's short stories, provide your high schoolers with these questions. You could use these to prompt higher level thinking for an upcoming test, or provide them as essay prompts. 

The odds will be in your favor that young statisticians will volunteer to participate in this experiment. After watching a short video that is part of the PBS Math at the Core middle school collection, scholars engage in a lottery and...

Who was Vincent van Gogh? Most of the questions can be answered in two or three sentences; however, there is at least one essay prompt and one personal response question that require longer answers. Questions call for a good mix of...

Wes Magee's poem "The Chimney Boy's Story" about chimney sweeps/climbing boys is used as an introduction to a lesson that asks groups to research child labor in Victorian Britain.